D-r 



CATHOLIC DOGMA 



THE 



ANTIDOTE OF DOUBT. 



BY 

WILLIAM EDWARD McLAREN, S.T.D., 
Bishop of Illinois. 




NEW YORK : 

JAMES POTT, CHURCH PUBLISHER, 

12 AsTOR Place. 

1883. 






Copyright, 1883, 
By JAMES POTT. 



PRESS OF J. J. LITTLE & CO., 
NOS. 10 TO 20 ASTOR PLACE, NEW YORK, 



PREFACE. 



THE substance of this little volume was contained in a 
series of lectures delivered by me some years since 
in the General Theological Seminary at New York. Sev- 
eral requests for their publication reached me at that time, 
but I preferred to wait until I could find time to rewrite, 
and somewhat rearrange the argument. Only recently has 
the pressure of episcopal duty been so far lifted as to 
afford me, in part at least, the coveted opportunity. Had 
more time been allowed me, I would have sought to elab- 
orate points which, as I am painfully conscious, have re- 
ceived inadequate treatment. 

In a certain sense, the argument may be regarded as a 
restatement of the -Vincentian Canon. But the reader 
will at once perceive that it leads the mind to higher 
sources than those to which St. Vincent pointed. He was 
content to rest his canon upon the " views '* of " the holy 
elders and fathers," and " the definitions and opinions of 
all, or at least almost all the priests and doctors together.'' 
But, deeply as we venerate the words of those who have, 
from age to age, borne witness to the Catholic Faith, and, 
with as much warmth of devotion as brilliancy of learning, 
taught and defended its sublime truths, it is more edifying 
to the believer, as it must prove more satisfactory to those 
who are harassed with doubt, to be directed to the ofifice- 
work of the Holy Ghost as the supernatural source of that 
"universal consent" which is the criterion of the truth. 



IV PREFACE, 

In a time of relaxed faith such as this, when among 
clergy and laity there is a deplorable tendency to substi- 
tute nebulous opinions or mere sentiments in the place of 
the enduring and substantial system of dogma which the 
Church has always held, those who love clear-cut truth as 
it stands attested by the consensus of the Body of Christ, 
will not withhold their prayers that even so humble an 
effort as this to show that there is a basis of certitude for 
faith to stand upon, may be blessed to the rescue of some 
souls from the paralyzing influence of doubt. 

Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul, ) 
Chicago, 111., October^ 1883. \ 



CONTENTS, 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Paralysis of Faith and Its Causes i 

II. The Fundamental Error of All Unbelief lo 

III. A Voice of Authority the Supreme Necessity 19 

IV. Jesus Christ the Highest Authority in the Realm of Truth. . 25 
V. The Teacher Sent from God Perpetually Present in the 

Church 33 

VI. The Church the Body of Christ— the Paraclete His Vicar. . 39 

VII. The Promise of Guidance fulfilled in the Catholic Faith. ... 46 

VIII. The Mode and Effects of the Holy Spirit's Teaching Influence 52 

IX. The Day of Pentecost — Inspired Oral Ministration 62 

X. The Holy Scriptures, Their Relation to the Spirit and the 

Church 73 

XI. Infallible Perception of Truth not the Endowment of the 

Individual 83 

XII. The New Testament and the Individual . . 92 

XIII. The Roman Pontiff not InfalHble 98 

XIV. Infallibility Not Resident in any Order or Body of Men. . . . 103 
XV. Universal Consent illustrated by the Analogy of Nature. ... 112 

XVI. The Conclusion of the Matter 118 



CATHOLIC DOGMA 



THE 



ANTIDOTE OF DOUBT. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE PARALYSIS OF FAITH AND ITS CA USES, 

THERE is something morally magnificent in the por- 
traiture of Saint Paul as he stands before us pictured 
by his own pen in the second epistle to Timothy. Un- 
daunted by suffering, unmoved by the reproach of the Gos- 
pel, he exclaims with a tone of triumphant certitude, " I 
know Whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is 
able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against 
that day."^ There is neither protest nor peradventure here. 
Every high quality of his soul is summoned to a supreme 
act of faith, and responds with such joyful distinctness that 
there is a sound as of chimes well tuned and harmonious. 
Notice, too, how he addresses himself to the Personality of 
that Lord Who found him ready to perish in the wilderness 
of Pharisaism and led him to the waters that poured from 
the smitten rock of truth, " I know WJiom I have believed,'* 
"And that Rock was Christ.*'^ Nor can one fail to ob- 
serve, in passing, the significant connection between an 
enthusiastic faith in the personal Christ and strong alle- 
» 2 Tim. i. 12. 2 I Cor. x. 4. 



2 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

giance to fixed formularies of the truth, when the Apostle, 
with his next breath, exclaims to his beloved son Timothy, 
*' Hold fast the form of sound words which thou hast heard 
of me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus." ^ 

That quaint but strong Scotch saint, Samuel Rutherford, 
furnishes another illustration of the power of a faith that 
rises to the height of assurance. "Our hope," he ex- 
claims, ^4s not hung upon such untwisted thread as ^I 
imagine so,* or, *It is likely ;* but the cable, the strong rope 
of our fastened anchor, is the oath and promise of Him 
Who is eternal verity ; our salvation is fastened with God's 
Own hand and Christ's Own strength to the strong stake of 
God's unchanging nature."^ 

The spiritual beauty of such a faith as this, resting 
calmly on the rock of certitude, is very fascinating. It 
wears that peculiar air of dignity and native strength which 
challenges the admiration of eyes that can discern the 
loftier elements of human character. It suggests the pres- 
ence of that rugged type of devotion which does not make 
any. account of the martyr's fate, and which seems by com- 
parison with the less positive kinds of loyalty to truth to 
refuse them any place in the census of human heroism. 
There is vastly more of this undoubting confidence in the 
truth of our holy religion than the superficial observer 
would conjecture. There is a constituency of faithful souls 

1 2 Timothy i. 13. "The words of St. Paul to Timothy, which are 
found in his second letter, introducing the command * keep the de- 
posit,' seem most clearly to direct his pupil to prepare such a formula, 
if he had not one already in hand. * Have (or draw up) a sketch of 
the wholesome words which thou heardest from me in faith and love 
which is in Christ Jesus.' The words are vTiorv'itQD6iv ex^ v^yiai- 
vovroDv XoycDv, Fo7'mam habe sanorum verborum.'*' — Dictionary of 
Christian Biography, William Smith, D.D., art. "Creeds," Vol. I., 
p. 696. 

2 Letters of Samuel Rutherford. 



THE PARAL YSIS OF FAITH AND ITS CA USES. 



3 



among the high and the low, the wise and the uneducated, 
who make no effort to give voice to their convictions 
except to the ear of Him Who hears all. But it must be 
acknowledged that, beautiful as this serene trust in Chris- 
tianity as the final expression of moral truth is, there are 
many among us who, while they admit it, cannot participate 
in it, because they are haunted by doubts concerning the 
things which are most surely believed among us. They 
constitute a class for whose restoration to robust faith par- 
ticular efforts should be put forth, and to w^hom, possibly, 
a recital of the means by which others, once in like sad 
plight, escaped the bondage of doubt and regained their 
liberty in Christ may, by God's added blessing, enable them 
to know the certainty of those things wherein they have 
been instructed. There are many avenues to the truth. 
Indeed, it may be said that all roads would lead to Christ, 
if those who traverse them were wise travelers. And it is 
much to be desired that every avenue shall be pointed out 
and made plain, to the intent that all may be allured to 
the truth of God. Our present purpose is to attempt to 
throw some light on one path which has conducted souls 
to a sense of fixed and final confidence in the truth. 

A sincere man, doubting but not desiring to doubt, will 
feel that it has not been altogether a strong and noble thing 
to permit the access of doubt through tame submission to 
exterior conditions, and will recognize it as a primary ob- 
ligation that he shall not wholly surrender his faith without 
first engaging in a manly struggle to regain strength of 
conviction. He is breathing the atmosphere of a world- 
wide religious battle-field. The force of faith is at this 
juncture minished among men. But it is not honest treat- 
ment the truth gets when men easily reject it because 
others despise it. Nay more, he who penetrates a region 
where the air is charged with malaria, which robs manhood 



4 CA THOLIC DOGMA, 

of its virile strength and turns the rose upon woman's 
cheek to ashes, is under compulsion of nature's first law 
to prepare himself for the encounter, and then to resist by 
every practicable means the assault of the deadly foe. To 
rush into the decomposing morasses as he would climb to 
the crystalline purity of Alpine airs, would be to court the 
fate he almost deserved. But the efforts of a person who 
honestly resists doubt must not only be of pure intention : 
they must have intelligent direction. It is our belief that 
many of those who constitute this class of irresolute minds 
have suffered the paralysis of faith in consequence of the 
particular condition of things characterizing our own age, 
to which we have already referred. Now if this be the 
case, it would be as unwise as it would be dangerous for 
them to decline a careful study of the religious characteris- 
tics of the age, and, particularly, to scrutinize them in the 
light of preceding epochs of history ; for the ages inter- 
pret each other, as they also reproduce each other. 

History has many hidden meanings, and it requires a 
mind that has been appropriately cultivated to detect these 
more subtle lessons ; but there are facts which, as well as 
the principles that control them, are patent to every intelli- 
gent eye. 

An ordinary survey of the religious history of mankind, 
during the period that has elapsed since the establishment 
of the Church of Jesus Christ, reveals very distinctly the 
fact that the Faith which was once delivered to the saints,^ 
has moved forward along a line of alternating elevations 
and depressions. An age in which the believing spirit 
dominated ever seemed to generate a critical age, which 
was followed by scholarly and then popular unbelief. But 
the sceptical spirit was itself subject to this process of re- 
action, and prepared the way for an age of faith. 

' St. Jude 3. "Aitaz, = once for all ; semel pro se?nper. 



THE PARAL YSIS OF FAITH AND ITS CA USES, 



s 



These alternations do not imply any defect in the truth 
as a revelation of the mind and will of God ; for Christian 
truth, if it has any claim to the title, must consist of definite 
ideas, essential, abiding, and universal, whether they are 
formulated or unexpressed, nor can it at any time be less 
than the truth. But when we contemplate the organs of per- 
ception in man, we plainly discover that in its relation to 
human thought the truth may be less distinctly apprehended, 
or, in its control of the will, less loyally acknowledged. 

It were folly to ignore the imperfections of our nature. 
There is in us a centrifugal tendency which we dare not 
fail to take into account. Other tendencies constantly 
resist it, ordinarily restrain it, and often neutralize it, so as 
to turn the governing motives of life in an opposite and 
nobler direction ; but in many it is only a resisted and 
not a conquered tendency. So strong a bias against those 
higher aspirations after God which also exist within us, 
must leave its impression upon the mind, and does in great 
measure account for those alternations of belief and un- 
belief which the chronicles of religion record. 

Thus the human mind has seldom been able for a long 
period to retain a perfect equipoise of reason and faith. 
Liberty has ever exhibited a tendency to lawlessness, while 
authority easily degenerated into tyranny. Faith became 
credulity and lapsed into superstition. The violence done 
to faith was laid at faith's door, while our poorly-balanced 
nature, which seldom uses God's gifts without abusing 
them, was really responsible for the result. As natural as 
the oscillation of the pendulum from one extremity of its 
arc to the other, is the reaction of the mind from super- 
stition to scepticism. It is a difficult task for those who are 
inspired by the passions of the contest to reach accurate 
judgments as to what should be surrendered and what 
should be accepted ; but when a calmer spirit dawns it 



6 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

becomes evident that in proportion as the reaction from 
error was too radical, the reaction to error was more strik- 
ing, and the passion to destroy error became a stronger 
motive than the ambition to conserve truth. A blind faith 
will sooner or later go to reason for eyesight ; but the 
result v\^ill be one which dazzles rather than guides, and the 
mind will linger in the cold light only until the hunger of 
the soul for God sets in, and he who doubted the truth 
begins to doubt his doubt, while he who lost faith in God 
loses faith in his unbelief, and turns back affrighted to cast 
himself prostrate before the altar he was ready to demolish. 
But, in addition to such causes as are discovered to 
exist in the defects of our nature, there are reasons 
incidental to the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ why its 
progress should be characterized by alternating conditions 
like those of a sternly contested battle-field. There is an 
essential enmity between truth and error. Our Lord in- 
dicated this when He said, ** Think not that I am come to 
send peace on earth : I came not to send peace, but a 
sword.'* ^ Christianity is distinctly a supernatural religion, 
and as such projects itself into the sphere of the natural 
man, who receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for 
they are foolishness unto him ; ^ and it proposes its best 
benefits only to those who willingly receive the super- 
natural gift of spiritual discernment. Its message to the 
world is predicated upon the theory, which it deems a 
palpable fact, that the world is a fallen world, and that it 
does not possess the power of self-recuperation. It pro- 
poses to those who think they are whole and need not a 
physician remedies which demand the confession that the 
whole head is sick and the whole heart faint ; and it 
chooses its own terms in exhibiting these remedies. To- 
wards the /j-^f//^^^ revelations and the false religions (some 
* St. Matthew x. 34. ^ i Corinthians ii. 14. 



THE PARAL YSIS OF FAITH AND ITS CA USES, 7 

of them organized and aggressive), which enjoy the alle- 
giance of millions, the more sturdy to assert their claims 
and the more difficult to contend with, because their errors 
are subtly intermingled with truth, it must present an 
attitude of antagonism. Still less must it surrender to 
distortions and perversions of its own characteristic truths, 
and suffer the vain imaginations of the religious astrologer 
to stand for the pure science of heaven. 

Such are some of the causes which contribute to make 
the hold which God's truth gains upon the minds of men a 
variable force. 

When an individual, who has felt this sense of uncer- 
tainty in regard to truths once firmly believed, realizes that 
the age in which he lives is characterized by great unbelief, 
with much attendant irresolution of belief, there is pre- 
sented to his mind the strongest possible argument for 
intelligent self-scrutiny and heroic resistance of untoward 
influences. 

But the benefit which he is likely to experience will be 
largely increased as he shall proceed to trace out any 
special causes which may have operated to produce this 
period of depressed faith and menacing arrogance of un- 
belief. 

It does not require a very profound study of the history 
of our times to discover that the present condition of the 
world of religious thought is the cumulative result of a 
series of fierce assaults, without parallel in their force and 
subtilty, which Christianity has sustained during the past 
one hundred years or more. Although every assailant has 
been met, breast to breast, by a defensor fidei^ serious con- 
sequences have ensued. 

First (to go back no further), came the cold naturalism 
of the English deists, which still exercises a malign in- 
fluence, though their names are almost forgotten. The 



8 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

atheistic spirit of the first French Revolution is not yet an 
exploded force : it survives in tendencies which are easily 
detected in our own as well as in other lands. The scholarly 
rationalism of Germany, succeeded, as it was, by a harvest 
of popular unbelief, is likely to repeat its history on these 
shores. Positivism, which deified collective humanity, 
and knew no life beyond the tomb, prepared the way for 
that agnostic blindness to which everything but physical 
phenomena is unknowable, and for religion presents us a 
sordid materialism in which selfishness is duty, science is 
providence, and secular success is heaven. The con- 
sequences of these assaults upon the faith are manifest. In 
literature scepticism is insinuating and plausible, putting 
poetry, history, fiction, and philosophy under tribute. In 
education, bold beyond parallel, it inspires thousands of 
the student class with its sneering spirit, and manipulates 
the public school system, it is to be feared, as the engine 
of its zeal. In the public press it is a moral pestilence. 
It seeks to commend itself to popular favor by identify- 
ing itself with popular causes. It has even effected an 
entrance into pulpits and attacks religion in the name of 
Him Whom it seeks to dethrone. The sceptical wing of 
the scientific class sneer at the idea of ^' forcing the gener- 
ous wine of science into the old bottles of Judaism," and 
have succeeded, by dint of imaginative generalizations 
from incomplete data, in creating among unthinking 
people the impression that the foundations of the faith 
have been undermined. The thunder of battle is also 
heard in the direction of metaphysics, and pompous phi- 
losophies announce their intention to sweep the old religion 
from the earth. 

In such a state of things, in which the sceptical spirit 
pervades the air like a miasmatic vapor, few are able to 
resist its influence entirely, although its effects are by no 



THE PARAL YSIS OF FAITH AND ITS ^CA USES. g 

means uniform in degree. It is a long way from a state of 
dubiety with respect to some particular aspect of the truth, 
to the vulgar and ruthless hostility of an atheist like Ja- 
colliot. 

Perhaps we might deem unbelief to be illustrated in 
nature by the evening sky, which is at first only less bright 
than the sun that has disappeared, but which declines 
through many a waning hue, and is shaded off at last into 
black night. Doubt is the first faint shadow of the gather- 
ing gloom. 



lO CATHOLIC DOGMA. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE FUNDAMENTAL ERROR OF ALL UNBELIEF. 

IT will be found profitable to subject the sceptical ten- 
dencies of our time to a somewhat more searching 
analysis. It is well to know the circumstances of their his- 
toric rise and development, well to appreciate their per- 
vasive influence, well to recognize the injuries which the 
cause of truth has suffered in this world-wide conflict ; but 
it is also well to scrutinize them if haply we may ascer- 
tain whether there exists between them some bond of 
affiliation or underlying principle common to all. We may 
characterize these tendencies as a subtle influence pervad- 
ing the world of thought ; but the doubting mind will desire 
a more specific description of the miasm. 

Scepticism has its peculiar methods of exploration with- 
in the realm of truth, sees with peculiar obliquity of vision 
the phenomena that present themselves there, and reaches 
conclusions which correspond with its peculiar processes 
of induction. In one word, it represents an abnormal and 
diseased condition of man's interior nature, and its charac- 
teristic symptom, as well as fatal defect, consists in its fail- 
ure to conserve unison of aim and concordance of action 
between those faculties of man's nature by which it is de- 
signed that he shall perceive and embrace the truth ; and 
this vicious method coming to be adopted by some who 
have possessed strength and reasonableness of faith, pro- 
duces painful if not disastrous results. I do not mean to 
say that the masses of Christian people perceive and em- 



THE FUNDAMENTAL ERROR OF ALL UNBELLEF. 1 1 

brace the truth of their religion through their using a fault- 
less method of demonstration, with formal arguments and 
trains of proofs that are irresistible. "A sailor who takes 
the moon's age and the hour of high water from his 
almanac with no knowledge of the theory of the tides or 
of the moon's orbit, is as well off for practical purposes as 
the astronomer who calculated the tables.'"" Moreover, 
there are pathways to conviction which the mind traverses 
without consciously consecutive steps of progress, knowing 
only that the terminus of faith has been reached. Many 
persons also believe on the faith of others, and when they 
fall into doubtfulness it is because others doubt, just pre- 
cisely as most of the popular scepticism is not loss of faith 
in God, but loss of faith in the faith of others. Still it is 
largely true that much of the uncertainty and irresolution 
which exists among those who have not consciously sur- 
rendered faith is traceable to the fundamental defect of 
all unbelief with respect to the symmetrical use of the 
faculties. 

Truth exists and it must be cognizable. Coming from 
the Infinite Mind, it is addressed to man as a being pre- 
sumed to be endowed with faculties by which he may both 
perceive and embrace it. But it is pertinent to inquire as 
to the proper signification of the term. 

Are these faculties distinct centers of cognition included 
within our complex nature — separate jurisdictions ruled by 
independent powers or qualities of the mind ? Or, are they 
simply different states or aspects of a nature whose primary 
and distinguishing peculiarity is its icnity^ the states or 
aspects of which we separate and classify only for con- 
venience of expression? An individual may at a given 
period be influenced by the predominance of a particular 
side of his nature, as, for example, he may now be pre- 
^ Conder, The Basis of Faith, p. 135. 



12 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

dominantly swayed by his affections, again by his discur- 
sive powers, or, still again, by his determinative capacity; 
but in none of these instances, nor in any others that are 
conceivable, does he so entirely surrender to any particular 
predominance as to be emancipated from the influence of 
the other faculties. Indeed, it would prove impracticable 
for the intelligence to act without the concurrence of the 
will, or the will without the intellect ; nor will the coldest 
process of ratiocination be long untouched by some gleam 
of feeling. We are essentially one, and the differentia of 
our nature suggest only various characteristics of our unity. 
This law of our being, which is also a fact of our conscious- 
ness, cannot be ignored by us without incurring penalties 
of a serious kind ; and yet nothing is more frequent among 
thinkers than this unreal way of contemplating man, as 
though each mind were composed of several distinct enti- 
ties, as an aviary contains many species of birds. In point 
of fact, the mind is one and only in its manifestations other 
than one, and it is to this unity that the messages of truth 
which emanate from the Divine Mind are addressed. 

If, now, we desire to illustrate the baleful effects of this 
error, we do not need to journey far to find a person w^ho 
is willing to admit the testimony only of his sense percep- 
tions in his endeavor to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. 
He has made of himself a Polyphemus, his one eye incapa- 
ble of seeing in material nature 

*' The thin veil 
Which half conceals and half reveals the face 
And lineaments of our King." 

It is this Polyphemus who cannot see soul anywhere in the 
universe, to whom, thought and will are no more than func- 
tions of the brain, and love, wit, and imagination due only 
to superior cerebral organization, whose sole law is neces- 



THE FUNDAMENTAL ERROR OF ALL UNBELLEF 13 

sity, the morale of whose existence is '^let us eat and 
drink, for to-morrow we die/' As a mere speculation, 
materialism would have little influence ; but it is a theory 
which ministers to some of the strongest though lowest 
tendencies of our nature, and hence it has its prophets 
among thinkers thinking falsely, and its devotees among 
the besotted crowds to whom pleasure and pelf are life's 
strong aim and best reward. 

Truth does not employ coercive measures, and therefore 
men who do not use the eyes of the soul will not be forced 
to perceive it. God reveals Himself to man as to one 
entity ; and, therefore, as much to him feeling as to him 
reasoning. What is usually termed the moral faculty is 
simply that state of the soul in which it is predominantly 
engaged in viewing the side of things that involves obliga- 
tion, the oughtness of things ; not as though this moral 
activity excluded, but rather as it includes all other pos- 
sible activities of the soul. It is when thus occupied that 
the soul looks out upon the spiritual world and learns to 
discern the nobler world which is above the plane of sense, 
to exercise reverence toward the Infinite, and to appreciate 
all that is pure, elevating, and good. There is, indeed, a 
danger here, as well. Precisely as if we absorb ourselves 
in physical science, and seek the witness only of material 
things, we are tempted to surrender ourselves to material- 
ism, so this relation of the spirit to the knowledge of divine 
things may be indulged at the expense of other relations, 
so as to incur the penalty of credulity and fanaticism. 
But why should we, therefore, ignore the spiritual intuitions 
unless we also propose to deny the testimony of sen- 
sational perception ? or rather, why should we be required 
to accredit what comes to us from the vile earth beneath 
us, but be asked to regard as vain and futile imagina- 
tions those golden visions of the far-seeing soul which we 



14 



CATHOLIC DOGMA, 



behold when we stand on tiptoe and gaze off into the^ 
higher realms of being ? 

Moreover conscience, which is God's monogram on the 
soul, demands recognition, and has supreme right to join 
its testimony with that of consciousness to supplement the 
deficiencies which we feel when we confine ourselves to 
lower states of cognition, and to bear concurrent witness 
that behind the material and the phenomenal towers the 
awful form of absolute Being, uncaused and causing. In 
the perception of this testimony, the rigid uniformity of 
law, and the amazing complexities of phenomena only tend 
to elevate our conceptions of the wisdom, power, goodness, 
and infiniteness of that Being, Conscience is the soul 
seeing Right, and through that a righteous God — not a 
dim, dreary, nebulous something or nothing that is un- 
knowable. Conscience will not suffer reason to conceive 
a possible God who has set the wheels of development in 
motion to produce an intelligent creature with an instinct of 
dependence on Him, and a native impulse of prayer to 
Him and a disposition to thank Him for benefits received, 
while He proves to be neither rod nor staff to the v>^eary, 
with no ear for prayer nor heart to beat responsively to 
human love. A strange God that ! a God who implants 
in us a feeling that we are in His hands not as a soulless 
law or an inexorable fate, but as a personal Father, able to 
stoop to our cries, and willing to minister to our necessi- 
ties ; and yet who, when we utter our prayer or lift our 
song, retreats to inaccessible heights, and consigns us to 
soulless law and inexorable fate ! We cannot believe as 
much as that. It were less credulous to believe in the 
God who reveals Himself in the sacred depths of our con- 
science, and who meets its necessities with pardon and, 
after that, peace. 

Passing to what is termed the rational faculty, we may, 



THE FUNDAMENTAL ERROR OF ALL UNBELLEF. 



15 



with propriety, ask what, after all, is the ancient conflict 
between reason and faith but a difference about unreal 
distinctions in our nature ? When men will reason as if they 
were endowed with no capacity except that of discursive 
thought, they must expect to suffer the penalties consequent 
upon violating the symmetry of their being. If reason has 
the sole power to find and recognize truth, why is it always 
in search of it, yet never finding it ? why does history 
furnish all this dioramic display of brilliant but evanescent 
philosophies ? why did they not give infallible deliverances 
in the long distant days when there was yet no Christian 
revelation to question their teachings? why has every 
effort to plant on the ruins of Christianity a logically per- 
fect universal religion that would illustrate the impertinence 
of supernatural revelation miserably failed ? In the time 
of St. Paul Ave read that the world by wisdom knew not 
God ; but that world has not made any advance in divine 
science since, although there has been no intermission in 
the struggle of the speculative reason to unlock the secret 
chambers of knowledge. One system of philosophy after 
another has arisen to condemn the errors of its predecessor, 
but also to meet the same fate itself in due time. Admit 
that the Platonic and Aristotelian systems have ever 
lingered in close relation with Christian thought, and what 
does it signify except that the guesses of the Greeks v/ere 
reason's closest approximation to the truth ? 

The mediaeval contention of Anselm and Abelard still 
continues. Abelard tells us that only reason can know. 
But Anselm rejoins that faith also can know. Abelard 
insists that we can know only what is demonstrated 
to our capacity of reflective analysis, and that to be- 
lieve in Anselm*s sense is to take something on trust 
which cannot be so demonstrated ; wherefore the yvooai'^ 
of philosophy is worthier a rational being than the tticdTi^ 



1 6 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

of religion. But Anselm maintains that faith also can 
know ; and further, that reason must trust. And this 
is clear, since reason does not rest on itself but on its data. 
The characteristic feature of the rational faculty is that it 
builds up on inductions. There is therefore a necessity 
why it must trust its foundations. Indeed, all conclusions, 
whether of faith or reason, are built upon the authority of 
something antecedent to their final perception. But these 
states cannot be disunited without danger of error. The 
contention between intellige ut credas and crede ut inteUigas 
does violence to the unity of nature. Both are true, but 
true only when they are complementary each of the other. 
" We will leave them their belief, if they will leave us our 
philosophy,*' said Strauss. But what God hath joined 
together let no man put asunder ; and, for that matter, who 
designated the philosophy of Strauss or of any other thinker 
to represent the rational powers of man and speak the 
final word concerning all truth, not excluding those higher 
truths of the spirit about which reason never could have 
positively known had not the moral powers certified their 
existence ? 

But on the other hand it would be folly to refuse reason 
her rights in the soul. Not as supreme arbiter and judge 
but as a co-ordinate authority, she will ever exercise a 
powerful influence in the perception of truth ; and if the 
heart (which, it has been pithily said, has reasons which 
reason does not know), tends to exaggerated activity, so 
falling into mystic dreams or fanatic fervors ; or, if the 
conscience pushes its authority until morbid pharisaism 
sets in, it is fortunate that reason is at hand to assert her 
neutralizing influence and maintain the equipoise which 
lends dignity and nobleness to our nature ; but never so 
to assert herself as to rob the heart of that deep joy which 
St. Augustine felt when he wrote in his Confessions, " in 



THE FUNDAMENTAL ERROR OF ALL UNBELIEF, 



17 



Cicero, and Plato, and other such writers, I meet with 
many things acutely said, and things that awaken some 
fervor and desire, but in none of them do I find these 
words, ' Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden, and I will give you rest/ "^ 

It has been pointed out how each sense affords a dis- 
tinct, and, so far as it reaches, a complete point of contact 
with the external world, and is yet unable to convey to the 
mind a report of all the properties of an object. The ear 
cannot detect a color nor the eye a sound. This is nature's 
parable of a deeper truth in religion, the more general per- 
ception of which would put an effectual quietus upon much 
of the seeming wisdom of those who in trying to ascertain 
religious truth are guilty of the absurdity of attempting to 
hear light or motion, or smell sound, and because they 
cannot accomplish the impracticable, gravely announce 
that light, motion and sound do not exist, or, at least, are 
unknowable. 

Bishop Butler, speaking of the evidence of Christianity 
as coming from many sources yet constituting one argu- 
ment, compares the conviction it enforces to the general 
effect which a vast architectural pile impresses upon the 
beholder. If all the details which go to make up the total- 
ity of evidence have the power of producing this unity of 
impression, it m.ust be that all the aspects of our nature, 
all the means by which we are capable of perceiving truth, 
shall co-operate harmoniously in the act of perception. 

This contempt for symmetry and proportion, so far as 

it characterizes the perception of truth, must exercise an 

unhealthy influence upon the tone of faith among those 

who believe. Coming into contact with the philosophy of 

sensational consciousness, the Christian is tempted to doubt 

the existence and spirituality of God and the reality of his 

^ Confessions, vii. 
2 



1 8 CATHOLIC nOGMA, 

own soul ; the intuitional philosophy pushed beyond its 
proper limits tempts him to doubt outward evidences and 
authorities ; while the rationalistic spirit prepares him to 
doubt what he cannot demonstrate by intellectual pro- 
cesses. Thus truths w^hich are designed to certify them- 
selves to the whole nature become clouded and indistinct, 
and the soul grows weary and nervous, or seeks refuge in 
the scepticism of Pyrrho, to whom nothing was true, noth- 
ing false, everything uncertain except that it was possibly 
v/ell to be virtuous. There is no safety except in the co- 
ordinate exercise of all our powers. There will be discord 
and not harmony unless all the strings of the harp are in 
tune. 



A VOICE OF AUTHORITY. 



19 



CHAPTER III. 

A VOICE OF AUTHORITY THE SUPREME NECESSITY, 

WHILE we have sought to show that there must be a 
real and simultaneous co-operation of what are 
usually termed the faculties of cognition, in the use of 
which we may arrive at a knowledge of the truth, we have, 
at the same time, been brought face to face with another 
question, quite as important to consider and quite as essen- 
tial to the attainment of correct and satisfactory results, 
namely : By what means shall this necessary co-operation 
be secured ? 

Truth is and must be cognizable, and the nature of man 
is endowed with capacities of cognition by the right use 
of which he may perceive and embrace the truth. But his 
endeavors to ascertain truth have resulted in conclusions 
inconsistent with each other, giving rise to conflicts and 
controversies which have illustrated, not the illusory 
nature of that for which he sought, but his incompetency 
to propound methods of search upon which all can agree. 
Our moral unity, originally a perfect harmony, has been 
disturbed to such an extent that we are no longer capable 
of the healthful exercise of our faculties without the intro- 
duction of some extraneous influence to direct, restrain, 
and sustain us. 

What, then, amid all these vagaries and conflicts, is the 
force that shall reduce chaos to order and cause the dis- 
cordant notes of controversy to melt into one majestic 
strain ? If the voice of universal longing, the plaintive 



20 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

pleading of humanity, driven almost to despair by the strife 
of tongues and struggling to avoid the impending fate of 
blank unbelief, is to be regarded as possessing any sig- 
nificance, it certainly demonstrates that the one thing need- 
ful is a voice to instruct and a hand to guide us in our 
efforts to cognize truth. Look at the history of metaphys- 
ical speculation in modern Germany, and what is it, from 
Kant to Schopenhauer, but chaos calling wearily for some 
voice of authority to speak its disorganized elements into 
order and harmony ? So greedy is this desire for guidance 
that a willing flock has ever been found ready to obey any 
voice that would speak as with authority. Does not this 
disposition to trust human leaders blindly serve to illus- 
trate in the most vivid way at once our blindness and our 
need of some one to guide us ? Does it not also largely 
account for the world's great names in politics, science, 
literature and religion ? Socrates, discoursing wisdom in 
the streets of Athens, and the Pythian priestess, dreaming 
dreams and making auguries, illustrated the desire of the 
people of different classes to submit themselves to the 
decisions of an infallible authority ; nor does it require a 
critical scrutiny of modern society to discover the same 
love of hero-worship and the same willingness in every 
department of knowledge to abandon the mind to the 
guidance of some will presumed to possess the right of 
imperial command. 

But this willingness to follow guides and leaders with, 
implicit confidence in their powers is often found as- 
sociated, strangely enough, with an extreme sensitiveness 
in regard to individual rights and dignities. Authority 
is a word which stirs the blood and provokes indignant 
protest. Particularly when used in its relation to re- 
ligious truth, it seems to many minds to be associated 
with the idea of an assumed right of dictation without 



A VOICE OF AUTHORITY, 2 1 

appointment and without jurisdiction, or of a corporate 
enforcement of doctrine under physical sanctions, or 
of the surrender of all one's convictions into the 
hands of prescription. Doubtless these prejudices are 
inherited from the stormy epoch in which the abuses 
of authority precipitated the rebellion against Papacy 
and the reaction from scholasticism. But the prin- 
ciple of submission to authority in matters of belief was 
scarcely shaken, much less extirpated, in the sixteenth 
century, and there is no reason why we should be irritated 
by the name, seeing we accept the thing. The Reforma- 
tion, after all, was only a change of masters. 

In point of fact, the principle lies at the basis of all our 
actions and beliefs. Knowledge is conditioned upon our 
recognition of an authority upon whose testimony we 
accept given conclusions. It is impossible that we shall 
think a thought or lift a hand without an act of trust in 
testimony, and the moral claim of adequate testimony is its 
authority. It receives the assent of an intelligent judgment 
because we discover that it enjoys the right to be re- 
ceived, not on the ground that we are subjectively v/illing 
to receive it, but by reason of the imperative force of the 
evidence which it offers. The very foundations of knowl- 
edge are built upon this principle. Science cannot 
advance a step but by its permission. There must be a 
primary act of faith in that which certifies a fact or a truth 
to me, — whether it be a sense, a process of ratiocination, 
an intuition, or a voice ab extra, — else it is impossible that 
I shall acquire knowledge of, or exercise belief in, the fact 
or truth. AVell might Goethe call himself a believer in the 
five senses, for how magisterially do our senses demand that 
vvx shall accept their authority ! In any religious system 
the great mass of the ^^ simpler folk " will be found to build 
their faith on the authority of the individual teacher or of the 



22 CA THOLIC DOGMA. 

corporate communion ; while that which is final authority 
to them, itself falls back either on the decisions of councils? 
bishops, or popes, or on the Confessions of assembled 
divines, or on the apparent teachings of collated texts of 
Holy Scripture. Even the ardent advocate of " free 
thought" will crowd his margins and appendices with 
" authorities/* ^ 

The principle is universal. Men recognize it without 
protest, and without any sense of violence done to their 
freedom. In secular matters, they trust their all to it, and 
they do so spontaneously, with no fear of being betrayed. 
They are equally ready to recognize it in the realm of 
religious truth. 

It is, then, in close accordance with the laws of being 
that the soul, conscious of its incompetency of self-govern- 
ment, prays, amid the anarchy of its powers, for some 
kingly voice, the voice of no petty majesty whose scepter 
reaches a portion of the realm, but some voice of imperial 
dignity, whose tones shall carry to the farthest boundaries 
of man's nature the ultimate word which it were rebellion 
to doubt. A prayer so importunate cannot fail to be heard 
and answered. It would impugn the goodness no less 
than the wisdom of Heaven to doubt that means would be 
provided by which we may ascertain the truth, and secure 
the aid which will enable us to cognize and embrace it vv^ith 
all the harmony of our co-operating powers. 

Doubt needs to be assured that there is an infallible 
authority for faith to rest upon with the joy and peace of 
certitude. There is a rock of ages in this turbulent world. 
No storms can undermine it, no upheaval from beneath can 
jostle it from its calm equipoise. It eternally rests upon 
the being of God who is the Ultimate Authority. 

Doubt needs to be warned while it is assured ; for they 
^ Vide Hooker i. 328. 



A VOICE OF AUTHORITY. 



23 



who doubt the truth doubt the authority on which it rests, 
and to doubt God is to deny Him. A faith that wavers, 
therefore, involves itself in possible suicide. For while we 
may feel much sympathy with honest doubt, we must also 
consider that doubt undispelled leads to unbelief, which is 
the death of faith. Unbelief, as our Lord has taught, is 
the grand representative sin.^ 

The entrance of doubt may be a temptation to which 
the Christian surrenders, in which case it is not far to 
Lord Byron^s pitiful creed, ^^ I doubt if doubt itself be 
doubting ; " ^ or it may be resisted bias whose dark form 
retreats to its native gloom, driven away by the radiance of 
a tried but triumphant faith. In any event the means of 
its triumph must be the restoration to its rightful place in 
the soul of that authority on which the Christian man 
rests his belief in the truth. AYhen we behold doubt thus 
transmuted into a stronger faith, we can appreciate the 
words of the great dramatist : '' modest doubt is called the 
beacon of the wise." Of doubt such as this Tennyson 
sang in the familiar lines, 

*' There lives more honest faith in doubt, 
BeUeve me, than in half the creeds." 

The succeeding stanzas, though not so frequently quoted 
— sometimes purposely omitted, I suspect — describe, let us 
ardently trust, the experience of many who, like the one 
the poet-laureate knew, have been " perplexed in faith, but 
pure in deeds.'' 

" He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 
He would not make his judgment blind ; 
He faced the specters of the mind, 
And laid them ; thus he came at length 

St. John xvi. 9. 2 Don Juan, canto IX., xvii. 



24 



CA THOLIC DOGMA. 

" To find a stronger faith his own ; 

And Power was with him in the night, 
Which makes the darkness and the light, 
And dwells not in the light alone, 

'* But in the darkness and the cloud. 
As over Sinai's peaks of old 
While Israel made their gods of gold 
Although the trumpet blew so loud." 



JESUS CHRIST THE HIGHEST AUTHORITY. 2$ 



CHAPTER IV. 

JESUS CHRIST THE HIGHEST AUTHORITY IJV THE 
REALM OF TRUTH 

THE absence of harmonious and symmetrical action 
in the use of those states or faculties of our nature 
which were designed to enable us to perceive and embrace 
the truth has been shown to be characteristic of the vari- 
ous forms and degrees of unbelief which exist among men. 
The same defect has been seen to give rise to a chaotic 
condition of thought, in which conflicts have ever failed 
to secure definite results, aspirations after God have been 
baffled, and many have been tempted by keen disappoint- 
ments to ask — Is there, then, such a thing as truth in the 
world ? The one thing needful to extricate the mind from 
this deplorable dilemma was shown to be a voice of author- 
ity whose noble function it should be to dispel the glim- 
mering cloud of nebulas and reveal the clear-cut form and 
golden beauty of the truth. There is no passion in the 
soul of man, after the passion for truth, more eager than 
the desire for a guide and instructor in the search after 
and perception of truth ; and it would seem to be a natu- 
ral inference that implicit trust in authority must be a law 
pervading the whole realm of our existence. Faith is uni- 
versal. It is the antecedent of all knowledge. There must 
be an act of faith in that which certifies a truth or a fact 
to the mind, whether it be one of the senses of the body, 
a process of discursive thought, an intuition or a voice ab 
extra, A condition of the mind, in which doubt with 



26 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

respect to the truth of our holy religion predominates, is 
equivalent to a condition of mind which entertains a doubt 
as to the authority on which that religion bases and builds 
its claim to be received by mankind. But where, as is 
happily the case often, the doubt is resisted, a fresh and 
equitable scrutiny of the authority will demonstrate it to 
be plenary and adequate, and the results of the re-survey 
follow in the development of a more robust faith and a 
satisfactory sense of moral certitude. 

Our search, then, shall be for that one decisive Voice of 
Authority whose imperial mandate shall solve our diffi- 
culties, dismiss our fears, and minister to our minds ^* the 
confidence of a certain faith" in respect to the essential 
contents of the religion of Christ. 

We can scarcely imagine that even the mind which has 
felt the chill and shadow of a doubt will not experience a 
sense of sunshine when invited to recognize the Lord 
Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church, the " Teacher sent 
from God,'' *^ in Whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom 
and know^ledge ^ ^ ^ for in Him dwelleth all the fullness 
of the Godhead bodily,"^ as the Supreme Authority- 
before Whom a Christian man should bow. That author- 
ity acknowledged, another step confronts the mind with 
the body of truth which our Lord has taught to His 
Church, and which, inasmuch as it provides a substantial 
and enduring basis of certitude, is therefore a positive an- 
tidote of doubt for the class of minds in whom doubt is 
still a resisted sense of uncertainty. For the supreme 
authority of the personal Christ passes over into what He 
has taught, vitalizes it, and seals it with the mark of infal- 
libility. To appreciate the royalty of His presence, one 
must also acknowledge the majestic power of His words. 

That our Lord was the ultimate authority in the first age 
^ Col. ii. 3, 9. 



JESUS CHRIST THE HIGHEST AUTHORITY, 27 

of the Church is evident. We have but to go back to the 
time \Yhen the Incarnate One still dwelt among men full 
of grace and truth. We transport ourselves in imagination 
to '^the consummate years of Israel's fond hope." W^e 
share the enthusiasm of the poet who sang : — 

* I tread where the Twelve in their wayfaring trod ; 
I stand where they stood with the Chosen of God ; 
Where His blessing was heard and His lessons were taught — 
Where the bhndwere restored and the healing was wrought."^ 

With the disciples v/e visit Him upon the mountain. We 
stand in the presence of the Great Teacher. We listen to 
His marvelous utterances, and are "astonished at his 
doctrine." 

" For," as St. Matthew testifies, " He taught them as one 
having autJi07'ity and not as the Scribes."^ His words wxre 
magisterial. His doctrine was original. His demeanor was 
consistent with the awful claim which He put forth, and 
yet entirely congruous with the simplicity, sincerity, dig- 
nity, unselfishness and humility of His character. There 
is no doubt whatever that in the estimation of His first 
disciples He was the Prophet before Whom the created 
mind must prostrate itself. Unlike the lesser prophets of 
the old law, and the scribes vainly jangling over rabbinical 
traditions. He had a message of self-renunciation, for He 
was the very Logos by Whom the Infinite Mind syllabled 
Itself in terms suited to finite apprehension, for which cause 
also He came down from heaven. 

It would be difficult to overstate the sublimity of this 
attitude. He distinctly and repeatedly put forth as the 
generic feature of His mission, the claim, that He had been 
sent forth into the world from the bosom of the Father, 

I Poems of John Greenleaf Whittier — Palestine. Vol. i., p. 230. 
2 St. Matt. vii. 28, 29. 



28 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

and this without reserve, qualification, or intermission. 
With a stately composure He added to this the stupendous 
announcement that His relation to God was that of iden- 
tity of nature in such an absolute sense that to see Him 
was to see the Father. It was a necessary consequence of 
this relation that His doctrine represented the ultimate 
wasdom and truth, and revealed in part the true universal 
and absolute philosophy of which what we do not now 
know we shall know hereafter. He claimed, further, to be 
the moral Guide and Deliverer of mankind. He did not 
for one moment hesitate to exercise the divine prerogative 
and forgive sins. He placed His name between the throne 
of God and the prayers of mankind with solemn assurance 
of its mediating prevalence. He proposed to minister con- 
solation to the burdened and distressed, by inviting them 
to seek in Himself the fountains of pity and succor. He 
exercised, without a trace of impious assumption, the most 
godlike authority over spirits, good and evil, and accepted 
without ostentation the ministration of the holy angels. He 
announced Himself as the judge of the w^orld, holding in 
His hand the keys of destiny. He could not have held 
forth a scepter more divine, as the guide of souls and 
the deliverer of the human race. 

Imagination cannot conceive a more imperial attitude, 
nor a lordship reaching more widely over the realm of 
destiny or more deeply into the penetralia of the human 
spirit. 

Such a being must have possessed in Himself a primary 
and absolute right to *4each as one having authority." 
There is but one alternative. Canon Liddon in his Bamp- 
ton lecture on Our Lord's Divinity, states the alternative 
in these words : " Christ's self-assertion is not merely 
embodied in statements which would be blasphemy in the 
mouth of a created being ; it underlies and explains His 



JESUS CHRIST THE HIGHEST AUTHORITY, 29 

entire attitude towards His disciples, towards His country- 
men, towards the human race, towards the religion of 
Israel. Nor is Christ's self-assertion confined to the 
records of one Evangelist, or to a particular period in His 
ministry. The three first evangelists bear witness to it in 
different terms, yet not less significantly than does St. 
John ; and it belongs as truly, though not perhaps so 
patently, to our Lord's first great discourse as to His last. 
From first to last He asserts. He insists upon the acceptance 
of Himself. When this is acknowledged, a man must 
either base such self-assertion on its one sufficient justifi- 
cation by accepting the Church's faith in the Deity of 
Christ, or he must regard it as fatal to the moral beauty of 
Christ's human character. — Christus si non Deus, non 
bonus r ^ 

Our Lord's announcement of His teaching relative to 
the Church was as distinct as His assertion of the celestial 
origin of His mission and the divinity of His person. In 
that prayer of mysterious depth and beauty which St. John 
treasured in loving memory and afterwards committed to 
writing, our Lord exclaimed : " This is life eternal that 
they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus 
Christ whom Thou hast sent. * * * j^g^ j ^^^^^ 
given unto tJieni the words which Thou gavest Me, and they 
have received them and have known surely that I came 
out from Thee, and they have believed that Thou didst 
send Me."" 

This language makes it evident that the first act of their 
souls was submissive recognition of His lordly right to 
teach them the heavenly wisdom. There was no conscious 
process of reasoning. The soul simply owned the pres- 
ence of its Lord. The words were received because they 
^ Preface to the second edition, pp. xii., xiii. 
2 St. John xvii. 3, 8. 



30 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

were His words, and, once received, they carried home to 
the heart the deeper conviction that this imperial Being 
came forth from the Father. The faith which, as a germ, 
recognized authority, as a perfect flower knew God in 
Christ. Obedience was justified by its fruits and rewards. 

" / have given unto them the words which Thou gavest Me'' 
This, then, was the characteristic feature of the new faith, 
that it was a divine contact with man by the interposed 
mediation of a personal ambassador, with a positive mes- 
sage of truth, fresh from eternity and pure as heaven. 
The message was imperative because the Messenger was 
infallible. He taught with authority. " Verily, verily, I say 
unto you " — thus He gave the world the wisdom of the skies. 
There was but one practicable answer to the Galilean 
inquiry — " Whence hath this Man this wisdom?'" — and the 
answer was given at another time in the Temple, when the 
officers exclaimed with bewildered astonishment, " Never 
man spake like this Man ! " ^ 

Hence there is no source of primary truth other than the 
Lord Christ. It is an excusable impatience which hastens 
away from every voice to listen to His. In the most ex- 
clusive sense, our religion is Christo-centric. His doctrines 
are true because He taught them. The facts which are con- 
nected with His teaching are significant because they were 
associated with and made component parts of His mission 
to the world by the wonderful expedient of an Incarnation. 
His message was therefore unique and original. He was 
not a teacher who had been taught. He was not a teacher 
teaching truths recorded on ancient parchments. The 
transcripts of what God spake in times past unto the 
fathers by the prophets,^ were of exceeding value for in- 
truction and confirmation of faith, but the stars must fade 
' St. Matthew xiii. 54. ^ St. John vii. 46. 

3 Hebrews i. i. 



JESUS CHRIST THE HIGHEST AUTHORITY. 31 

when the sun appears. " God hath in these last days 
spoken unto us by His Son." ' As He did not draw His 
wisdom out of books, still less did He supply His disciples 
with a sacred and solemn tome from which they might 
gather the lore of eternity. To them the heaven-descended 
religion was one of facts, and visible institutes, and truths 
that were true though stylus never had touched papyrus. 
A book religion might well describe the religion of a mere 
teacher ; but this was a sublime novelty in the world — the 
religion of a Person. Christianity was Christ, and the 
disciples had the transcendent privilege of listening to the 
living Christ Himself, who is the Truth, and Whose diviner 
way of recording His message was according to the promise, 
" I will put My law into their mind and write it in their 
heart ;" a method which He did not relinquish, and has not. 

The truths of revelation were not enforced by our Lord 
because they had the sign-manual of reason upon them. 
They were not more exempt from the interrogations of 
the critical mind than the Almighty One of Whom the 
fool may say, " there is no God ; " but they did no violence 
to the reason, nor did they present one proposition which 
contradicted the laws of thought. When they transcended 
the capacity of the reflective powers they challenged reason 
to aspire to a loftier plane and worship while apprehending 
infinite things which, just because they were so high, were 
more divine. It is a crude and childish demand which 
insists that all things shall abase themselves to the level 
of reason. That is unreasonable reason. In its loftier 
flight, its nobler exercise, reason perceives its own limita- 
tions, and really attains to its own consummate beauty in 
accepting what it cannot comprehend exhaustively ; and 
for this cause we are bold to insist that in Jesus Christ 
reason was not dethroned but transfigured. 
' Hebrews i. 2. 



32 



CATHOLIC DOGMA, 



Nor did the Christian truths meet with acceptance by 
the early disciples because they were discovered to act 
upon life and form character as the truth might be pre- 
sumed to do. As a matter of fact, experimental evidence 
soon fortified their faith,^ but the primary ground of their 
belief was the word of Him Whom they recognized as a 
Teacher sent from God, and this was in accordance with 
His requirement ; for, when the doubting apostles asked 
visible demonstration of the relations of the Father and 
the Son, and the Son replied, ^^ he that hath seen Me hath 
seen the Father,'*^ He substantiated His word by the asser- 
tion of His authority as the primary, and His miracles as 
the secondary, basis of faith. ^^ Believe Me that I am in 
the Father and the Father in Me ; or else believe Me for 
the very works' sake."^ And the sacred record tells us 
that they believed, and were sure that He knew all 
things.^ 

' St. Matthew xi. 4, 5. ^ g^^ Jq^j^ xiv. 9. 

3 St. John XIV. II. 4 St. John xvi. 30. 



THE TEACHER SENT FROM GOD, 



33 



CHAPTER V. 

THE TEACHER SENT FROM GOD PERPETUALLY 
PRESENT IN THE CHURCH. 

THE same spontaneous recognition of the authority of 
our Lord Jesus Christ has continued through all 
time. Willingly led by the facts and verities of the Gos- 
pel, the Christian makes speed to gain the presence of the 
Son of God, saying with St. Peter, " Lord, to whom shall 
we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life."^ Perhaps 
this impulse of the soul towards Him is even stronger in 
those who have felt the cold, deathlike touch of doubt, as 
children nestle closer to a parent when danger is near. But 
even among positive unbelievers there is a disposition to 
pay homage to that presence. The more recent schools 
of unbelief emulate the devoutest discipleship in rendering 
homage to our Lord. Their assaults are mostly aimed at 
what are, strictly speaking, the outer works of the citadel 
of truth. Scripture and miracle, dogma and institution, 
are vigorously attacked, but when the columns of assault 
reach the presence of the Man of Nazareth, they drop their 
weapons and gaze upon Him with admiration and awe. 
Unbelief has sunk to a low depth, indeed, when there is 
no beauty in Jesus Christ that it should desire Him. Rous- 
seau's superb apostrophe to Jesus will recur to the mind. 
It was perhaps excelled by the tribute of the rationalist 
Bahrdt — " O thou great, godlike soul ! no mortal can name 
Thy name without bending the knee, and in reverence and 

^ St. John vii. 68. 
3 



34 



CATHOLIC DOGMA, 



admiration feeling Thy unapproachable greatness ? Where 
is the people among whom a man of this stamp has ever 
been born ? How I envy you, ye descendants of Israel ! 
Alas that you do not feel the pride which we who call our- 
selves Christians feel, on account of One so incomparable 
Being sprung of your race [ * * * That soul is most de- 
praved that knows Jesus, and does not love Him."' 

This imperial position in history awarded by the consent 
of the ages to this wonderful Being Whom we adore has 
not been explained upon any naturalistic hypothesis. The 
uniqueness of it and its moral magnificence constitute an 
argument of constantly accumulating force that He is 
indeed the true Light which lighteth every man that 
cometh into the world, shining into the darkness which 
admires while it comprehends Him not. Moreover, it de- 
monstrates by its persistence (for even in this unbelieving 
age His name is still above every name among the fore- 
most nations) that He is not a memory, or a spent force, 
or a God Who left His blessing in the world and went 
away, forgetful of this, to lavish His care on other worlds. 
No ! it was totally incongruous with the spirit and purpose 
of our Lord's mission that He should relinquish immediate 
and vital relations with the world or terminate His per- 
sonal authority in the realm of truth. The prime purpose 
of the Church which He founded was that it might bear 
witness to Him as the living, present Saviour to Whom all 
power is given in heaven and earth. It is, perhaps, easier 
to think of Him as there than as here, and as having all 
power in heaven rather than on earth. But His Church 
must witness to Him as He is ; as there and yet here, and 
here as really and truly as He is there. Just because He 
is here He is still accessible to men in all His saving power 

' Bahrdt: ** Moralische Religion," vol. i., p. 71, quoted by Dr. Cairns 
in ** Unbelief in the Eighteenth Centur>%'* 



THE TEACHER SENT FROM GOD. 



35 



and grace. He is here, Head over all in His Church, 
receiving sinners, hearing their confessions, pronouncing 
absolutions, saying ^^ Come unto Me," and "Wilt thou be 
made whole ?" or " Be loosed from, thine infirmity," or per- 
haps, "Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." 
His Church is not a Kingdom without a really present 
King. He is here actually reigning in it to-day, doing whsit 
He did of old in Galilee and Jerusalem, and greater works 
now than then — preaching, teaching, inviting, warning, con- 
soling, comforting, blessing at the marriage feast and stand- 
ing at the open graves of His saints ; taking little children 
in His arms, putting His hands upon them, blessing them, 
rebuking those who would keep them from Him, laying on 
His hands at the chancel-rail in Confirmation, and, at His 
own board, giving Himself, the very Bread of Life, to every 
believing and penitent soul willing to receive Him. It 
seems not so to unbelief and misbelief, nor yet to those 
whose thoughts and hopes are bounded only by cares and 
pleasures of this life. It is of the very spirit of unbelief 
to suppose that God is not here but away off beyond the 
stars, serenely unmindful of us and of our small affairs, and 
that there is no living Lord and King of angels and of men 
to Whom all power is given in heaven and earth. And 
more or less of this spirit obtains, too, with many who are 
trying to love and serve Him. Oftener than otherwise they 
think of Him as of One Who came and dwelt among us for 
a little space and went away to be gone for many a long 
day, perhaps for ages yet to dawn : that meanwhile they 
have indeed His example which they are to try and copy 
as best they can, and His words, written down in a book, 
the Book in which they are to grope, without a guide, for 
His truth, if haply they may find it to the saving of their 
souls. And so they are in doubt and perturbation of mind. 
So they discuss and argue and deny and rationalize and 



36 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

miss the blessings that might be theirs in looking to a pres- 
ent Saviour. From this spirit of unbelief come half the 
endless discussions and controversies that perplex and dis- 
grace Christendom. A living Lord is here present in His 
Church, according to the sure word of His promise ; but 
men have forgotten that promise, or they call it a mere 
figure of speech, and so they look upon His Church as a 
human organization which they are at perfect liberty to 
change and order as may seem good in their sight. They 
think of the Saviour as in heaven, not on earth ; and so 
when He would take their children in His arms and bless 
them, they say, "What good will it do the child?*' They 
think of Him as absent, not present ; and so when He asks 
them to confess Him before men in the ways of His ap- 
pointment, they regard it as simply the voice of a human 
teacher asking them to come to Baptism and Confirmation. 
Again He says, "Do this," "This is My Body,'* and "This 
is My blood," but they do not think of it as that which He 
is here present to impart, not as that which He would give 
us now, but as only a reminder of what He did for us long 
ago in the night in which He was betrayed. Or, because 
they think not of a present Saviour Whose property is 
always to have mercy, they turn to the Virgin Mother and 
to the saints at rest for help, and give to them that which 
should be given to Him only. Because they think not of 
Him as the one present infallible Guide and Teacher they 
transfer to a fellow-mortal an allegiance due only to Him 
Who is the One only infallible Lord and King of men. 
Thus in one way or another, the indifference, the practical 
unbelief, and the chief differences and controversies that 
afflict the Church of God and impede her work among men 
have their origin in unbelief in the real presence of the 
living Lord and Saviour of men. 

It is indeed true that, prior to His Ascension, there were 



t 



THE TEACHER SENT FROM GOD. 



37 



announcements of departure, and the institution of other 
methods of teaching the knowledge of the truth ; but it was 
not intimated that His physical invisibility would imply 
His personal and potential absence, nor that His prophetic 
function as the " teacher sent from God " was a temporary 
relation to the Church. His cry, " It is finished ! " dis- 
missed from the scene only the preparative, typical and 
transitional aspects of the Old Covenant. True, He said 
"I came forth from the Father and am come into the 
world: again I leave the world and go to the Father;"' 
and, "it is expedient for you that I go away."^ But He 
also said, "I will not leave you comfortless (orphans), I 
will come to you ;"^ and, "a little while and ye shall not 
see Me, and again a little while and ye shall see Me, 
because I go to the Father.""^ Here, side by side, were a 
predicted absence and a promised presence ; but, in real- 
ity, the departure was to be nothing more than the with- 
drawal of His physical nature from conditions in which 
It could be perceived by our senses, to the intent that He 
might enter upon the larger enjoyment of His spiritual king- 
ship. Temporal dominion and splendor was the Hebrew 
dream : a catholic sovereignty, including the whole uni- 
verse of spiritual being, was the reality. And this astound- 
ing empire, vast as the cosmos of soul, enduring as the 
years of God, became His when, on Ascension Day, He 
passed out of Judea into a realm where His environment 
was perfectly adapted to His infinite nature. His physical 
disappearance, therefore, was a nearer approach and not 
a withdrawal. He could now sustain vital relations as the 
personal Christ, not only with the little flock in Judea, but 
with the universal Church. ^* So long as He was living 
upon earth. He might give light to the country round like 
I St. John xvi. 28. "^ St. John xv. 7. 3 St. John xiv. 18. 

4 St. John xvi. 16. 



38 



CATHOLIC DOGMA, 



a beacon upon a hill. But it was only from His sunlike 
throne in the heavens that He could pour light over 
every quarter of the globe/' ^ Lifted above history He 
could now penetrate and fill all time with His presence, 
and become the conspicuous object which should irradiate 
alike the first and the nineteenth century with His spirit- 
ual glory. Brought into prophetic relation with the ever- 
expanding body of the Faithful, He could now speak the 
messages of divine truth with not a more imperious tone 
of authority but to the wide jurisdiction of souls united 
to Him, throughout the ages, "in the communion of the 
Catholic Church." 

Hare : '* Mission of the Comforter," p. 46. 



THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 



39 



CHAPTER VL 

THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST : THE PARA. 
CLETE HIS VICAR. 

" A ND Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All 
dr\ power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth." ^ 
It was in these terms that our Lord, after His glorious 
resurrection, announced the cosmic headship and authority 
with which His triumphant brow was crowned, and which 
was to become in the most plenary sense His royal preroga- 
tive when He should take His place at the Right Hand of 
God for the exercise of His mediatorial sovereignty. It 
was to be characteristic of the inconceivable glory of His 
exhaltation, that He Who had not where to lay His head, 
here in the valley of His humiliation, would by His 
majesty and might ^' fill all things,"^ so that no region even 
in "the lower parts of the earth,'' should escape the in- 
fluence of His imperial scepter. 

But there is a manifest distinction to be drawn between 
His headship of the universe and His headship of the 
Church. God the Father hath " raised Him from the 
dead, and set Him at His Own Right Hand in the heavenly 
places, far above all principality, and power, and might 
and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in 
this world, but also in that which is to come : and hath put 
all things under His feet, and gave Him to be Head over 
all things to the Church, which is His Body, the fullness of 
I St. Matthew xxviii. iS. 2 Ephesians iv, 10. 



40 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

Him that filleth all in all/'^ His relations to the universe 
are here shown to be secondary to those which He bears 
to the Church. That is the one kingdom which is too dear 
to Him and too intimately vitalized by His Own life to be 
classified with the other provinces of His wide sovereign- 
ty. They are put under His feet, but this is a Body, 
joined to Him as its Head, in so much that it is His "full- 
ness ** or complement, without which He is not complete. 
His natural body has been withdrawn from our world of 
sense, but He is still present in the Church, which is His 
mystical Body, — "a body mystical," says Hooker,^ "be- 
cause the mystery of their conjunction is altogether 
removed from sense ; '' but not the less truly existing and 
perpetuated in time and space by virtue of that conjunc- 
tion. It is not possible but that men shall go astray 
in their conceptions of the relation of our Lord to the 
Church and the world unless they firmly grasp that sub- 
lime thought which glorifies the pages of St. Paul's epistle 
to the Ephesians specially, but which also illuminates all 
the New Testament writings, that the Church is the Living 
Body of Christ manifesting Himself through all ages. He 
is its life, its regnant power, its unifying principle, stand- 
ing above it, and yet comprising it in Himself ; so that in 
it He makes a continuous world-wide manifestation of 
Himself, and by it accomplishes His purposes throughout 
the successive generations of history. By virtue of this 
mystical union (not metaphorical but real, constituting an 
organic corporateness). He Who is the Head of the Body 
works His will, invisibly, but not less efficiently because 
He is concealed behind the instrumentalities which He 
elects to employ. To say that Christianity is Christ is to 
speak in such a way as may give the impression that it is a 
system or code, and that He is simply the master-mind 
I Ephesians i. 20-23. 2 ** Works," III., i, 2. 



THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 



41 



Whose spirit and influence pervade it. But there is a 
closer approximation to the mysterious truth/ when we say 
that the Church is Christ. It is Christ mystically mani- 
fested in time and space, and having a relation to the 
eternal purposes of God that transcends the necessity of 
our race and touches the well-being of all worlds, to the 
intent that to them there may be a continual revelation of 
the manifold wisdom of God.^ It is only in the light of 
this Christo-centric view of the Church that we can ade- 
quately appreciate the nature of the divine-human organ- 
ism against which the gates of hell cannot prevail. 
Beautifully did the late Bishop of Brechin illustrate this 
primary yet profound truth when he wrote : " The Re- 
deemer did not merely live eighteen hundred years ago so 
as since to have disappeared and to exist only in history ; 
He is, on the contrary, eternally living in the Church. He 
is the abiding and only Teacher. His are all the baptisms 
absolutions, confirmations, ordinations. The Church is not 
a lifeless corpse, but His living Body, instinct with, pene- 
trated, quickened, hallowed by His life."^ 

Thus, then, we perceive how He Who has gone to take 
His place at the head of the universe includes within the 
mystery of an organic union the whole Church throughout 
the world, and is more really and effectually accomplish- 
ing infinite designs by it, and discharging His prophetic, 
priestly, and kingly functions in it than if He were an all- 
conquering Theocrat, enthroned in some imperial Salem, 
as the seat of omnipotence and the metropolis of a spiritual 
civilization. 

But the elevation of the Incarnate One above the con- 
ditions of time and space was succeeded by another step 

^ Ephesians v. 32. 2 Ephesians iii. 10. 

3 Forbes, ** Explanation of the Nicene Creed," p. 172. 



42 



CATHOLIC DOGMA, 



in the unfolding thought of God, having reference to the 
perpetuation of truth and its fuller development. 

All the Persons of' the Blessed Trinity are ever and 
everywhere supremely active, each one pouring Himself 
forth in inexhaustible streams of wisdom, beneficence, and 
power ; but a survey of the history of God's contact with 
the race of mankind indicates a certain order of personal 
manifestation to have been observed. As the anticipative 
activity of the Father had preceded the theanthropic 
advent of the Son, so this preceded the unmeasured 
communication of the Holy Ghost to the Church. 

When our Lord was about to go away from visible re- 
lations with His Church, He consoled His disciples with 
the promise : " I will pray the Father, and He shall give you 
another Comforter that He may abide with you forever ; 
even the Spirit of Truth." ^ The office of the promised 
Comforter was announced^ to be to testify of Christ, to 
teach all things, to act as the blessed Paraclete, to guide 
into all truth, to bring to remembrance, to show things to 
come, to abide with the Church forever, to regenerate the 
soul, to convince the world of sin, of righteousness, and of 
judgment, and to glorify Christ, ^^for He shall take of 
Mine and show it unto you.''^ 

Our Lord further announced a necessary connection 
between His Ascension and the Descent of the Holy 
Ghost. It was expedient for the Church that He should 
go away, " for if I go not away, the Comforter will not 
come unto you ; but if I depart I will send Him unto 
you.'"^ We may not be able to fathom all the depths of 
this expediency, because it is permitted us to know only in 
part the economic relations which subsist between the 
Persons of the Blessed Trinity ; but we do know that, as 

^ St. John xiv. 16, 17, 2 St. John xiv. and xvi. 

3 St. John xvi. 14. 4 St. John xvi. 7. 



THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST, 



43 



our Lord taught, it was not until He was glorified that the 
Holy Ghost came in the power and fullness of the new 
age. If we may indulge a hypothesis, possibly the Holy 
Spirit could condescend to resume intimate contact with 
the Humanity which had done Him such despite in losing 
the image of God, only after that Humanity, as assumed 
in spotless purity by the Eternal Son, was exalted to the 
throne of mediatorial sovereignty at the Right Hand of 
the Majesty on high/ 

But the munificent fullness of this manifestation of the 
Holy Ghost must not be misinterpreted as implying in any 
sense the banishment of the Head from His relations to the 
Body. To predicate the personal and potential absence of 
the Son from the Church because of the mission of the 
Spirit to it, would be to contradict the promises and cov- 
enants vv^hich He made, and a severance on such terms 
were impossible. He Who in consequence of a mysterious 
expediency must withdraw, physically, from the world of 
sense, declared that in a little while the Church should 
see Him again. " I go to My Father and ye see Me no 
more;'*^ — thus He predicted His invisibility to the out- 

I " Was it that the glory and intercession of Christ in Heaven was to 
be a main topic of consolation addressed by the Spirit to the heart of 
the bereaved Church ? Was it that the presence of our Lord in the 
Flesh might have continued those earthly yearnings towards Him which 
were more or less inconsistent with a spiritual appreciation of His 
Work and of His Person ? Was it that the victory must be perfectly 
won ere the gifts for men which the Conqueror receives can be dis- 
pensed in their fullness from heaven ? Was it that the mighty power of 
Christ's Intercession in heaven must be revealed to Christians by the 
magnificence of its first result ? or may not the heavenly Artist descend 
to reproduce the Image of Christ in the conscience and heart of human- 
ity until the Divine Original has been completed ? " — Liddon, '* Univers- 
ity Sermons," ser. x. Vide Hare, ** Mission of the Comforter," Note 
A ; and Martensen, ** Dogmatics," p. 333. 
2 St. John xvi, 10, 



44 



CATHOLIC DOGMA. 



ward eye. "Again a little while and ye shall see Me, 
because I go to the Father/'^ — thus He foretold the more 
glorious presence which was verified at Pentecost, and 
which has ever been effected by the Holy Spirit in the 
Church, as a perpetual indwelling, variously manifested by 
sacramental and other agencies. 

The very terms in which our Lord described the work 
which the Holy Spirit was to do in the Church indicate 
that it was not to involve independence of action. He 
was to come only as He was sent.^ He was to bring to 
remembrance what the Lord had said, and, in testifying of 
the Son, " shall not speak of Himself : whatsoever He shall 
hear that shall He speak." ^ It is thus made very evident 
that the Spirit was to exercise His distinctive functions in 
the Church under the mission and government of the 
Church's Head. Within the sphere of His mediatorship, 
the King Emmanuel was absolute because the Father had 
committed all things into His hand, and to no other end 
greater than that of ministering to the glory of the King 
did the Spirit receive and accept His pentecostal mission. 
"All things that the Father hath are mine : therefore said 
I, that He shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto 
you/'4 

This declaration not only reveals the subordination 
which economically attaches to the work of the Spirit, but 
it identifies, with equal emphasis, the teaching of the Spirit 
with the teaching of the Son ; and this prepares the way 
for the proposition that just to the extent that the teaching 
of our Lord Jesus Christ is authoritative and binding upon 
the Christian conscience, to the same extent precisely must 
the teaching of the Holy Spirit be so regarded. The 
raise that He should lead the Church into all truth {jrdaay 

* St. John xvi. i6. ^ g^^ ]o\\\\ xiv. 26. 

3 St. John xvi. 13. 4 St. John xvi. 15. 



THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 



45 



r7)v aX7]d£iav'' — all the truth), was positive and without 
qualification : it is, therefore, possible for the Church to 
fall short of infallible knowledge of the truth only when 
the promise that the Spirit of truth shall abide with her 
forever, shall prove false. 

It was a privilege to enjoy, as the Apostles did, the per- 
sonal fellowship and instruction of the Lord in the iiiti- 
macy of an earthly companionship, but every step in the 
manifestation of God for the w^elfare of the world indicates 
a process of cumulative blessing. The dispensation of the 
Spirit is a more intimate method of divine contact. Our 
Lord's perpetual presence in the Church, therefore, and 
His continual announcement of truth should be, to the 
perplexed mind, more profoundly still than an oral minis- 
tration, a refuge from doubt and a basis of certitude ; for 
the descent of the Spirit was characterized by a fuller 
manifestation of the truth, and the conjunction of the 
invisible Head with the visible Body was to the end, as 
St. Paul says, ^^that we henceforth be no more children, 
tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of 
doctrine."^ The original body of dogmatic truth is still 
taught by Him, but in ampler measure. Because the union 
between the Head and the Body has not been terminated 
He is still here among us engaged in the discharge of His 
prophetic function. " There is one Body, and one Spirit, 
even as ye are called in one hope of your calling ; one 
Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, 
Who is above ail, and through all, and in you all;"^ and 
the one Body exists to-day as it did when He was visibly 
its Head, and the one Voice of prophecy has not varied 
a syllable. Truth, like its Author, is the same, yesterday, 
to-day, and forever. 

I I St. John xvi. 13. 2 Epii, iy. 16. 3 Eph. iv. 5, 6. 



46 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE PROMISE OF GUIDANCE FULFILLED IN THE 
CA THOLIC FAITH, 

THE Son of God, Who is the eternal Logos or Revealer, 
has in different dispensations of revealed truth and 
goodness, chosen different methods of making the divine 
will known to men. Previous to the incarnation, He acted 
by theophanies and prophecies, but at length He exercised 
a theanthropic ministry upon the earth. That method was 
succeeded, or rather supplemented, by the promised de- 
scent of the Holy Ghost to guide the Church into all truth. 
Intelligibility is of the essence of a revelation. The 
distinctness of His previous unfoldings of the divine mind 
would lead us to anticipate that, as the personal organ of 
revelation, He would honor the means by which He chose 
to communicate so much of the truth as was necessary to the 
being of the Church and the welfare of the world. He 
could not have left the question. What is Truth ? to float 
in the nebulous region of hypothesis. He could not have 
founded the Church and sent the Comforter to dwell 
within her, as steps to inaugurate a dispensation of uncer- 
tainty. To contemplate Him as the enthroned Mediator, 
having all power in heaven and on earth, and to recognize 
the mission of the Holy Spirit to impress truth upon the 
mind of the Church, without looking to find a strong 
foundation of moral certitude witli respect to the essential 
features of that truth, would really be to resolve the Head 
of the Church into a vision of spiritual beauty forever 
faded. Then doubt were justified, and unbelief were 



THE PROMISE OF GUIDANCE FULFILLED. 



47 



reasonable. Then the throbbing question would be, how 
to account for the survival through so long a lapse of time 
of a religion which had failed to fulfill the promises of its 
Founder. 

But it has not failed. The Catholic Faith rescues us 
from the painful alternative. Constantly has the Holy 
Spirit taken of the things of Christ and shown them unto 
the Church, and constantly has the Church repeated her 
earliest efforts to ascertain the mind of the Spirit when, by 
the associated and sympathetic fellowship of ^^ the apostles 
and elders with the whole Church,"^ she was enabled to 
secure that invisible guidance and trustworthy illumina- 
tion which justified the positive announcement, "it seemed 
good to the Holy Ghost and to us ; ^ and as constantly 
have the multitude of believing souls rejoiced in submit- 
ting themselves to a method so divine and infallible, by 
accepting the Catholic Faith with implicit confidence in 
the authority of Jesus Christ. Of perpetual application are 
the words of St. Vincent : " He is a true and genuine 
Catholic that loveth the truth of God, the Church, the 
Body of Christ — that preferreth nothing before the religion 
of God, nothing before the Catholic Faith ; not any man's 
authority, not love, not wit, not eloquence, not philosophy ; 
but, contemning all these things, and in faith abiding, fixed 
and stable, whatsoever he knoweth the Catholic Church 
universally in old time to have holden, that only he pur- 
poseth with himself to hold and believe. But whatsoever 
doctrine new and not before heard of, such an one shall 
perceive to be afterward brought in of some one man, be- 
side all or contrary to all the Saints, let him know that that 
doctrine doth not pertain to religion, but rather to tempta- 
tion ; especially being instructed with the sayings of the 
blessed Apostle St. Paul For this is that which he 
^ Acts XV. 22. 2 Acts XV. 28. 



48 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

writeth in his faithful Epistle to the Corinthians — There 
must (quoth he) be heresies also, that they which are ap- 
proved may be made manifest among you — as though he 
would say, this is the cause why the authors of heresies are 
not straight rooted out by God, that the approved may be 
made manifest; that is, that of every one it may appear how 
steadfastly, faithfully, and constantly he loveth the Catholic 
Faith." ^ 

The actual existence of this body of Christian teaching, 
containing all things necessary to be believed and done in 
order to salvation, and held by the whole Church with 
moral unanimity from the beginning to the present time, 
witnesses with an emphasis that is overpowering to the fact 
that our Lord has not been unmindful of His promise. 
The Holy Spirit illustrates the verity of His mission in the 
existence of the accepted dogmas of Christianity, as the 
Church illustrates the reality of her divine origin by re- 
ceiving them and holding them with gratitude and invin- 
cible tenacity. 

As the mathematical computations of Le Verrier in- 
structed him to turn his glass to a particular quarter of the 
heavens in order to discover a new planet, which at once 
revealed its golden beauty to his gaze, so the natural and 
necessary steps of progress which the mind takes in trac- 
ing the pathway of our Lord's relation to His Church as 
the Teacher sent from God have brought us face to face 
with the Catholic faith. This is what the Church holds to 
be of the essence of Christianity, which the Church pro- 
fesses and teaches her children to profess and believe. It 
is the Catholic Faith because the Catholic Church holds it, 
and that, too, in a Catholic sen^e. But the Church holds 
it because the Body of Dogma, of which it is composed, 
and which is almost entirely contained in the Catholic 
^St. Vincent of Lerins, ** Commonitorium," chap. xx. 



THE PROMISE OF GUIDANCE FULFILLED, 



49 



Creeds, is identified as the teaching of the Holy Spirit by 
the test of Catholic or universal acceptance. The applica- 
tion of this criterion definitively fixes the boundaries of 
essential truth. The Catholic Faith is not a dream — a 
theory — a philosophy. It includes and excludes certain 
definite things. 

It includes all the Historical Facts connected with the 
Incarnation and the Incarnate Life of our Lord, all the 
Truths revealed with regard to the Constitution of the 
Divine Nature, all the Institutes and Media which our Lord 
established as the ministers and channels of His grace, 
and all the Doctrines v/hich He taught, personally or me- 
diately, and which the whole Church has always received 
and maintained. In one w^ord. Catholic Dogma includes 
all things which a Christian man ought to know and be- 
lieve in order that (for Christianity is a life as well as 
a science, and doctrines imply duties) he may daily 
increase in the Holy Spirit more and more until he come 
unto God's everlasting kingdom. 

It excludes everything which is not the statement by 
adequate authority of a truth revealed from heaven or of 
a fact connected with that revelation ; that is to say, it 
excludes — 

1. Opinions or speculations which are of individual 
origin and limited acceptance. 

2. Systematized statements of doctrine based upon some 
private philosophical view of religion. 

3. Widely held but not universally received inferences 
from Catholic Dogma. 

4. Views which are claimed to constitute the peculiarity 
of any special sect of people without, or coterie or party 
within, the Church. 

5. Obscure ideas in Holy Scripture upon which three 
has not prevailed any consensus of interpretation. 



so 



CATHOLIC DOGMA, 



6. Facts and ordinances which, while religious in their 
character, lack divinely ordered connection with the rise 
and development of the kingdom of heaven. 

The principle which necessitates this line of separation 
by which some things are included in the Body of Catholic 
Dogma and some things excluded from it, is that nothing 
can be accepted as binding upon the faith of the Church 
except that which is announced to be true by an adequate 
authority. The vitality of Catholic Dogma is entirely de- 
pendent upon the authority which has promulgated it. Its 
truth may be made to appear upon other grounds, rational, 
historical, exegetical, logical, or experimental, and it will 
bear every test which may be fairly applied to it, because 
it is true ; but as part of the essential contents of Chris- 
tianity it must be accepted primarily because the authority 
which announces it is incontestable, supreme, and absolute. 
The universality of its acceptance is at once the proof and 
consequence of its origin. 

It is by the application of the same test that we dis- 
tinguish that which is essential and that which is incidental. 
Relatively to its Author, all truth is essential ; but relatively 
to mankind as contemplated by the Christian revelation, 
that only is essential vfhich contributes to fulfill the pur- 
poses of the revelation. Revelation does not comprehend 
all truth. As there are stars in the sky v/hich the glass of 
the astronomer has not discerned, there are heights of 
divine wisdom which we have not reached ; but our respon- 
sibility does not include these. There are heavenly bodies 
visible to the eye whose motions and governing laws the 
skill of science cannot fully master, just as there are con- 
nected with the teachings of our Lord suggestions of truths, 
glimpses of profound thoughts, obscure hints of loftier 
planes of knowledge, hints of a generalization that over- 
arches all time, space, being, eternity itself, with a philos- 



THE PROMISE OF GUIBA.VCE FULFILLED. 



51 



ophy too sublime to be compared with the fragmentary 
theories of men, — which in the present life, at least, we 
may not expect to know in their fullness. Had the neces- 
sities of our race required them to contribute essential 
elements in the scheme of the Incarnation, they would 
have been revealed with sufficient distinctness, and they 
would properly have been included in the body of dog- 
matic truth. 

There will be found to exist some private differences of 
opinion concerning what ought to be regarded as essential 
truth. Doubtless the advocates of views, systems, philoso- 
phies, and interpretations, which are eliminated from the 
catalogue of necessary dogmas will feel themselves chal- 
lenged to plead for criteria which shall discriminate in 
their favor, but as our argument progresses we hope to 
make it appear that the criterion of catholicity is not an ar- 
bitrary one, dictated by polemic urgencies, but is grounded 
in the very nature of things, and constitutes for the Church 
and for the doubting Christian an infallible test of essen- 
tial truth because distinctly and immediately related to the 
authority of the Teacher sent from God. 



52 



CATHOLIC DOGMA. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE MODE AND EFFECTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT'S 
TEACHING INFLUENCE, 

rpHAT august Being Who is the supreme authority in 
-JL the realm of truth discharges His prophetic function 
by the vicariate of the Holy Ghost. But to whom does 
the Holy Ghost deliver the things which He has re- 
ceived, and where shall we find the organ of His infallible 
deliverances ? This question leads on to another — How 
shall we connect the Body of truth which is designated 
Catholic Dogma with the influential activity of the Holy 
Spirit and the ultimate authority of our Lord Jesus Christ ? 
It has already been intimated that the very fact of the 
existence of a Body of Dogmatic Truth which rightly bears 
the title of Catholic because of the universality of its re- 
ception by the Church, throws a flood of light upon the 
work of the Holy Spirit in His vicarial oflice of teacher 
and guide. It shows that the Spirit does in very deed 
exercise His function in the sense of universality of con- 
tact with the Church's mind ; that is to say, as Catholic 
Dogma' demonstrates the fact that there is on the part of 
the Church a universality of acceptance, so this acceptance 
shows that the relation of the Spirit to the mind of the 
Church is universal. 

St. Paul elaborated this thought in his first epistle to the 
Corinthians.^ He found occasion in the peculiar condi- 

1 Cor. ch. xii. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT'S TEACHING INFLUENCE. 



53 



tion of the Church at Corinth to give special instruction 
with regard to the effects which had been wrought by the 
influence of the Holy Spirit. These were either the ordi- 
nary graces and virtues proceeding from Him, by imme- 
diate contact or by sacramental agency, or those extraor- 
dinary endowments (such as inspiration and the charisms)^ 
which were not designed to continue permanently in the 
Church. The Corinthians v/ere to some extent unbal- 
anced by the marvelous character of these supernatural 
phenomena, and the Apostle sought to quiet their dissen- 
sions by a variety of counsels, among which the most 
prominent had reference to the principle of unity which 
denotes the Church as the Body of Christ. All the gifts 
of the Spirit are the gifts of that one Spirit into 
Whom we have all been baptized into one Body. For 
as the human form is one and yet has many members, 
and all the members of that one body, being many, 
are one body, '^ so also is Christy^ It followed, therefore, 
that, although the gifts which the Spirit had poured 
out in such affluence of grace were individual endow- 
ments, they were distributed to each one, severally, only 
because these were parts of an organism which bound 
them up in a vital unity, countlessly diversified in its mem- 
bership but ever abiding as a complex and glorious whole, 
because Christ is one.^ He is the principle of its unity and 

^ Compared with His ordinary gifts these charisms were not more 
supernatural, but they were not permanent, nor did they enjoy greater 
honor on that day of exciting and seemingly inebriating transports, for 
the Apostles stood with singular serenity among the astonished people 
while St. Peter preached a thoughtful sermon ; and then they pro- 
ceeded to administer the sacrament of the new birth, as our Lord had 
commanded. As methods of contact between the Spirit and the Church, 
they seem to differ from the ordinary methods in degree rather than 
nature. In either case, there is the same mystery of operation. 
2 I Cor. xii. 12. 
3 ^'Totus Christies caput et corpus est ^ — St. Augustine. 



54 



CATHOLIC DOGMA. 



% 



the source and sustainer of its life, working His will 
in it none the less really because invisibly, by the Holy 
Spirit, through various means and methods, and coming 
into influential relation with the individual because each 
one is a member of the one Body. " For by one Spirit are 
we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gen- 
tiles, v/hether we be bond or free ; and have been all made 
to drink into one Spirit."^ 

This is such a community of life, and of faith, and of 
suffering, and of hope, that while each receives from the 
whole, each also contributes to it. Our union v/ith the 
Church is the ground of our communion with each other. 
It is like the falling of rain-drops into the current of a- 
mighty river, which do not lose their identity, but gain 
what in their individuality they could not have secured. 

This truth has been well stated by the learned author 
of the Bampton Lecture for 1868 in the following words : 
'^ We believe with St. Cyprian and St. Augustine that when 
Christ promised to St. Peter the keys of the kingdom of 
heaven,^ He promised them to the Church at large, whose 
faith and whose unity St. Peter on that occasion repre- 
sented. We believe that in the case of the admission of a 
child or a converted heathen into the Body of Christ by 
Holy Baptism, it is the Church at large, the common par- 
ent of Christians,^ who bears as a mother the newly-made 
member of the Body. We believe that in the Holy Com- 
munion it is the whole Church, the Body of Christ, which 
commemorates the life-giving sacrifice of the Lord, feeding 
its unity and its holiness by feeding on the meat indeed 
and the drink indeed of His spiritual Body and Blood. 
We believe that in Absolution it is the Church's peace that 
is given ; that in excommunication the sentence is to be 
pronounced upon such as, when their sin has been told 
I Cor. xii. 13. 2 St. Matt. xiv. 18. 3 Gal. vi. 26. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT'S TEACHING INFLUENCE, 



55 



to the Church, refuse to hear the Church/ If a council 
makes decrees in matters of faith, it does so not as over- 
ruling the Church, nor as issuing laws of faith to the 
Church, upon its own authority, but as representing, more 
or less faithfully, the entire Church, and speaking in its 
name ; so that its decrees are binding in exact proportion 
to that faithfulness. All these things speak plainly to the 
great truth that in the Church, in its entireness, in all its 
members, not in some one only, dwells the fullness of the 
Holy Spirit, and so the ultimate authority which nothing 
but the indwelling of the Holy Spirit can give.'*^ 

The relation of the Holy Spirit to the mind of the whole 
Church, viewed in its entirety as a Catholic organism, is 
not a truth that can be exhaustively defined and made sim- 
ple to a child. Like the highest mountains, it hides its 
summit in the clouds. The distinctive elements of super- 
natural religion must, by their very nature, transcend the 
limits of our power of comprehension, because, as truths 
and ordinances, they represent no mere department of 
creation, no rudimentary expression of the will of God, 
but the very fullness of His wisdom ; and therefore lead 
upward, beyond the line of our ability to follow, toward 
the very bosom of the Infinite. Hence we should expect 
to find an inscrutable factor in every truth of our religion, 
as the token of its divine authorship. 

The union which subsists between the Head of the 
Church, and the Body, the Living Organism, is a ^^ mysti- 
cal union." In like manner, the psychological method by 

I St. Matt, xviii. 17. 
2 "Administration of the Holy Spirit." Bampton Lecture for 1S68. 
By George Moberley, D.C.L., Lord Bishop of Salisbury. Pp. 47, 48. 
In the same chapter. Dr. Moberley shows that this, however, is only 
half of a great truth — the supplement of which is the existence in the 
Church of a divinely authorized representative priesthood. 



56 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

which the Holy Spirit impresses truth upon the mind of 
this organism, this Catholic unity, does not reveal itself. 
The fact appears, the 7nodus is concealed within the clouds 
that envelop its summit. Indeed, it is evident that as a mode 
of communication it is less perspicuous than that which 
our Lord employed when, visibly present among men, he 
discharged His prophetic functions orally. After His As- 
cension, the Apostles must have remained in total darkness 
as to the character of that coming of the Comforter which, 
while it had been distinctly promised, had not been de- 
scribed. The result also of the coming was distinctly 
announced, but there was entire silence as to its modus. 
When the day of Pentecost was fully come, certain super- 
natural incidents of the descent of the Spirit were audible 
or visible, but the actual coming was enveloped in mystery. 
They knew the event and were conscious of the results, 
There was an immediate operation of the Spirit upon their 
whole nature, and "they were all filled with the Holy 
Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit 
gave them utterance ; " ' but it was regulated by a law of psy- 
chological contact which has not been revealed, and which, 
if we may dare to speculate upon so divine a mystery, is one 
of those " deep things of God " for whose expression there 
is no adequate equivalent in a language of finite terms. 

Our Lord foreshadowed the inscrutability of the Spirit's 
work in His conversation with Nicodemus,^ when He an- 
nounced the necessity of the new birth by water and the 
Spirit, a revelation of truth which astounded the aged in- 
quirer. Llis astonishment took the shape of a query, 
How? — the perpetually recurring question of the over- 
curious mind ; in quo modo^ what is the method of bestowing 
this supernatural birth ? To this our Lord replied by an 
analogy drawn from nature and designed not to define the 
^ Acts ii. 4. ? St. John iii. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT'S TEACHING INFLUENCE, 57 

truth, but to illustrate the mystery of it : ^^ Marvel not that 
I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind 
bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound 
thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and w^hither it 
goeth : so is every one that is born of the Spirit." Our 
Lord meant to show that as the "breath of God" in the 
natural world " bloweth where it listeth," thus the breath of 
God within the kingdom of heaven is, as to its mode of 
contact, independent of the control of man. The mobile 
air floats calmly on the bosom of the deep, or lashes it to 
fury ; imparts a gentle motion to the leaves of the forest, 
or levels it to the earth with its stern vehemence. Only 
in a heathen's imagination did ^olus confine the winds in 
a cave, and send them forth to do their varied errands on 
the earth. So this life-giving, all-pervading Spirit freely 
breathes on the souls of men and inspires them with 
thoughts of God, the just Judge and merciful Saviour. 
But the eye cannot detect that which in the physical world 
we call wind. A voice goes moaning through the forest 
on a winter night, or breathes on the strings of the harp 
which has been placed at the window, and we say, it is the 
wind : but what we actually cognize is the effect of an 
agency imperceptible to our senses. " Thou hearest the 
sound thereof," — that is all. 

The perfection of the analogy to illustrate our Lord's 
thought comes out more beautifully at every step. The 
mighty Agent, Who works in baptism and all the sacra- 
ments. Who moves on the heart, convicting it of sin, of 
righteousness, and of judgment ; Who by multiform instru- 
mentalities brings to bear upon the souls of men the 
powers of the world to come, and Who leads the Church 
into all truth, utterly eludes the recognition of sense, and 
does not permit Himself to reveal the hand which does the 
work, nor us to hear the " still, small voice " that in the 



58 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

silence of the soul whispers the truth of God. Only by 
His works do we know Him. He does not suffer any 
mind to catch the remotest glimpse of His methods. 
Here is absolute mystery — " thou canst not tell." Sooner 
hope to fathom the secret law which regulates the mission 
of the winds. The air that fans our brows to-day may 
have blown over the wide seas yesterday, and to-morrow 
may refresh the invalid in some distant sick-room — " thou 
canst not tell.*' Speculation is in vain. And the con- 
clusion of the matter is that, as science cannot explain all 
the phenomena of meteorology, neither should Nicodemus 
marvel that he must accept the agency of the Holy Spirit 
in the new birth as a mystery. 

In contemplating the operations of the Holy Spirit as 
commissioned by our Lord and descending in the majesty 
and power of His infinite nature to write the wisdom of 
the new dispensation upon the impressible mind of the 
Church, we must accept whatever limitations God may see 
fit to place upon that august mission. The theologian who 
assumes an oracular tone in discussing the deep things of 
God knows no more than the " little child '* of the king- 
dom. But the mystery of the mode need not obscure the 
reality of that principle of contact by virtue of which the 
Spirit takes of the things of Christ, and shows them in 
distinct outline to the mind of the whole Church as the 
means of her salvation and the assurance of her finally 
accomplishing the purposes of God. The Body by which 
the truth is perceived and stated must be the Body to 
which the truth is revealed. The " one Spirit " and the 
"one Church" are the parents of the *^one Faith." 

Reverently passing from the mystery of the Spirit's 
methods, we may now consider the effects produced by 
His teaching influence upon the mind of the Church — the 
catmenical mi?id. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT'S TEACHING INFLUENCE, 



59 



These are neither concealed from us nor surrounded by 
mystery, — "thou hearest the sound thereof/'^ The Holy 
Spirit as the Way-Leader,^ the Guide, has conducted the 
Church to the sunlit regions of a definite revelation — an 
ecumenical faith. When St. Paul wrote to the Ephesian 
Christians that the one Lord, the one Body, the one Spirit 
were associated with the one Faith, he further taught them 
that our Saviour's Ascension Gifts ^ were bestowed upon 
the Church to promote and insure this specific end, that 
the Church should attain " the unity of the faith and of 
the knowledge of the Son of God,"^ and this purpose once 
accomplished the Church would not only possess the un- 
speakable treasure of an irreformable and abiding creed, 
but would be by that means panoplied and defended against 
error. A fixed and definite " one Faith " would tend to 
develop such a maturity of conviction, such growth of 
faith " unto a perfect man " that we should '^ henceforth be 
no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about 
with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and 
cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive ; 
but speaking the truth in love may grow up into Him in 
all things. Which is the Head, even Christ : from Whom 
the whole Body fitly joined together and compacted by 
that w^hich every joint supplieth, according to the effectual 
working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of 
the Body unto the edifying of itself in love."^ 

This truth spoken in love is the Catholic Faith. It is 

'St. John iii. 8. 

^OdTJyo^, St. John xvi. 13 — 'OSrjyrjdei v/ia^ ei<5 Ttadav rrjv 
dXrf^JEiav, He shall lead the way for you into all the truth. 

SEphesians iv. 11 — "And He gave some apostles, and some pro- 
phets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers." 

4Ephesians iv. 13. SEphesians iv. 14, 15, 16. 



6o CA THOLIC DOGMA, 

that body of truth which the Holy Spirit has impressed 
upon the mind of the Church viewed as a corporate unity. 
It cannot be denied as an abstract possibility that His 
prophetic relation to an individual might be plenary, but 
there is no evidence that such an instance has ever oc- 
curred. It would require a special revelation to certify the 
case if one should occur, because the individual would not 
necessarily be able to perceive it as a fact of consciousness, 
nor would others receive it without adequate testimony. 
When, however, we contemplate all Christians as a mass, 
and not as a mass of units knit together by some natural 
tie of sympathy or alikeness, or of principle and leader- 
ship, but as a mass formed into one supernatural body by 
the fusing power of Him Who vitalizes the unity by His 
indwelling, viewed thus, we say, there is in the Church an 
underlying corporate life, one in its origin, its sustentation, 
and its destiny, upon which, as upon a sensitized plate, He 
photographs the essential truths, the only truths which 
need to be presented to us with infallible accuracy ; and 
this unity of impression is the assurance of unity in the 
apprehension and unison in the statement of those truths. 

The pure, distinct, univocal strain of the whole Church, 
filling all ages with its music, is the voice of the Great 
Teacher by the Holy Spirit, and formulated it becomes 
Catholic Dogma. Here is rock for the doubter to stand 
upon, and renew his faith. 

Many methods of verifying the essential truths of Chris- 
tianity have been announced, and all are good so far as 
they do good ; but for the most part, though they are broad 
paths for a little space and thronged with eager multitudes, 
they lead to mazes, to cloud-land, to dismal midnight. For 
every nostrum there is a constituency. But surely that 
method must be obligatory, as well as certain to reward the 
mind that applies it honestly, which flows smoothly out 



THE HOLY SPIRIT'S TEACHING INFLUENCE, 6 1 

from the fountain of our Lord's promises to the Church, 
and harmonizes with the facts of history, which are but the 
fulfiUment of those promises. 

If this criterion were no more than a hypothesis, one of 
many such, further pursuit of the subject might be idle ; 
but its concordance with the teachings of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, its consistency with the actual developments of the 
dispensation of the Holy Spirit, and its universal accept- 
ance among Christian people, at least as to the essential 
principle which underlies it, warrant us in challenging 
other methods to a comparison. But we shall first ascer- 
tain to what extent it is illustrated by the initial chapter of 
Christian history. 



62 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE DA Y OF PENTECOST^IN SPIRED ORAL MINIS- 
TRA HON. 

ON the day of Pentecost our Lord was present with 
His Church as He had not before been — that is, un- 
restricted by the limitations to which He submitted when 
exercising His mediatorial ministry upon the earth in vis- 
ible form. No longer subject to the conditions of time 
and space, He came into new relations with His Church 
by the descent of the Spirit. The promise of the Paraclete 
was fulfilled. To the whole Church, then no more than a 
grain of mustard-seed, but holding in itself the potential 
life that was to develop into the many-limbed tree of Cath- 
olicity, the Holy Ghost was communicated as the Giver of 
Life, the Witness of Truth, the Author of Holiness, and 
the Source of Illumination. T/ie results were immediately 
apparent. 

At once the Church gave forth appropriate tokens of the 
new indwelling, for, "being filled with the Holy Ghost,** 
they " began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave 
them utterance." The scattering Babel curse of many 
tongues met its antithesis in a blessing which broke down 
the partitions that divided humanity, and inchided all peo- 
ple in the bond of a Catholic unity. 

At once the coward Apostle became rock-like, and stood 
up with the Eleven to repel the charge of inebriation, while 
in holy boldness he proclaimed what the illuminating glory 



THE DA V OF PENTECOST. 



63 



of the new light had now revealed to him, that the Pente- 
costal manifestations were due to the power of Him Who 
had died and risen again. " Therefore, being by the right 
hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father 
the promise of the Holy Ghost, He hath shed forth this 
which ye now see and hear/'^ 

At once the sacramental agency by which the Church 
was to make conquests from a penitent world, and by 
which the influence of the Spirit was to be propagated, was 
announced : " Then Peter said unto them. Repent and be 
baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for 
the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the 
Holy Ghost." ^ 

At once there was a more vivid apprehension of the 
spiritual grandeur of the Incarnation and all its associa- 
tions. The facts of our Lord's earthly history became 
transfigured with supernatural beauty, and to such an 
extent was their appreciation thereof intensified by the 
conscious influence of the Spirit, that when the Apostles 
announced themselves " witnesses of these things " they 
added, " and so is also the Holy Ghost Whom God hath 
given to them that obey Him/'^ It was to them a distinct 
proof of the presence of the Spirit of God that one should 
confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. ^ 

At once appeared that didactic function which, not less 
than the sacramental, inhered in the apostolic office, ac- 
cording to the commission — '^ Go ye therefore, and teach 
all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and 
of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe 
all things whatsoever I have commanded you : and, lo, I 
am with you alway, even unto the end of the world ; " "^ and 

I Acts ii. 33. 2 Acts ii. 38. 3 Acts iv. 32. 

4 I St. John iv. 2. See also i Cor. xii. 3. 
^ St. Matt, xxviii. iq, 20. 



64 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

these unlearned men caused the rabbinical doctors, skilled 
in the deepest lore of the schools, to marvel at their mes- 
sages. 

At once a concrete Faith emerged, and " the Apostles' 
doctrine '' was closely associated with their " fellowship," 
as among the first fruits of the Holy Spirit's influence/ 

At once the unifying purpose and power of the Head 
revealed itself in the Body, and, being filled with the Holy 
Ghost, *^ the multitude of them that believed were of one 
heart and of one soul."^ 

Thus Pentecost is seen to have been a new era, a fresh 
start for man, another Genesis ; the second Adam at its 
head ; the life-giving Spirit brooding over it ; with this 
larger blessing resting upon it, that He Who visited the 
ancient covenant people, in veiled form and with measured 
power, was now to abide in the Church in the fullness of 
a personal ministration forever.^ 

I Acts ii. 42. 2 Acts iv. 31, 32. 

3 * * Although the Holy Spirit v/as formerly given in and under the 
law, yet after the appearance of the Gospel it was no longer obtained 
by the followers of the law, but was their privilege, who, having left 
the law, believed in the Gospel. The Most Holy Dove forsook the 
ark of Moses and fixed its habitation in the Church of Christ. The 
Spirit left the letter, as the soul the body, and the law became truly a 
dead letter. A sufficient proof of which were the conspicuous gifts of 
the Holy Spirit, transferred from the Synagogue to the Church, when 
on the day of Pentecost not a tempest of thunder and lightning and 
horror, as when formerly on this very day the old law was given from 
Mount Sinai, but the mighty power of the Holy Spirit descended from 
heaven, and appearing in the form of fiery tongues, settled on the Apos- 
tles ; and soon after the same miraculous gifts were generally and abun- 
dantly poured out upon the whole congregation of Christians ; while 
with the professors of the law * the spirit of slumber' alone remained — 
a spirit truly worthy of those who, when the substance itself was offered 
them, pined after the shadow." — Bishop Bull on ''Justification," Dis. 
2, ch. II, § 7. 



THE DA Y OF PENTECOST. 



65 



This initial chapter of the history of the new dispensa- 
tion, in revealing the results of the descent of the Holy 
Ghost, also brings to light the means by which these results 
were accomplished. 

The mission of the Spirit embraced many functions, in 
the discharge of which He made use of a diversity of 
means. It will be sufficient for our present purpose to 
enumerate such as He employed in order to lead the 
Church into all truth. 

But why may we not regard all the means and instru- 
ments whereby He communicates with the spirit of man as 
contributing to a deeper insight into truth, and more ex- 
plicit miastery of its terms ? Blindness and ignorance are 
the offspring of sin ; holiness is the sister of knowledge. 
The sacrament of the new birth is associated with a spe- 
cific grace, but we may well believe it of those three thou- 
sand souls who were baptized on Pentecost that their love 
of divine wisdom, and their capacity of acquiring it, were 
stimulated by the grace of baptism ; and of those who 
were subsequently blessed with the Laying on of Hands, 
that they gratefully received the Spirit of wisdom and 
understanding, the Spirit of counsel and knowledge. It is 
of the very essence of all graces that they clear the facul- 
ties, enlighten the whole being, and prepare the way for 
the entrance of new conceptions of truth and nobler views 
of the being and attributes of God. 

Of the means which were specially chosen and pecu- 
liarly adapted to the instruction of the Church in the knowl- 
edge of the new truths, the Apostolic Ministry in its various 
ranks came first in the order of time and importance, not 
as having in itself any light to shed, but as reflecting the 
light of the Pentecostal flame. It was the divine idea of 
the Protevangelion to save man by man;' nor was this 
^ Gen. iii. 15. 



66 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

principle laid aside as soon as the Incarnation was effected. 
As the Only Begotten Son of God, our Blessed Lord occu- 
pied a substantial relation with the Godhead which could 
be shared by no creature, not even the Archangel himself ; 
but as the Son of Man He was ^^ the first-born among many 
brethren/' ^ the " apostle and high - priest of our pro- 
fession," ^ who was to be accompanied and succeeded by 
a human ministry. Between Him and them there was 
established a certain correspondence of mission, in such 
wise that the sending forth of the Eternal Son from the 
bosom of the Father met its analogy in their mission at 
the hands of the Son. "As My Father hath sent Me, even 
so send I you."^ Therefore He gave apostles, prophets, 
evangelists, pastors and teachers to the Church, " for the 
perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for 
the edifying of the Body of Christ."^ Between Him and 
them there was also established a representative relation. 
He was the Divine Principal : they were His agents. Hence 
they were designated ambassadors for Christ. 

Called as "chosen vessels," sent in a purely ministerial 
capacity, successful in their labors only as God gave the 
increase, their well-defined mission was to do the will of 
Him Who sent them, He living in them and doing His 
work by them, not purposing that they should be the am- 
bassadors of a distant sovereign, but the visible agents of 
a royal Master, Who would invisibly accompany them, and 
work in and by them, through His Holy Spirit. 

As the instrument by which at the first the Spirit im- 
pressed the truths of revelation upon the mind of the 
Church, the apostolic ministry was entrusted with a pecu- 
liar mission. While He dwelt in and enlightened the whole 
Body, there were diversities of gifts and of operations,^ 

^ Rom. viii. 29. ^ lieb. iii. I. 3 St. John xx. 21. 

4 Eph. iv. ir, 12. 5 I Cor. xii. ' 



THE DA V OF PENTECOST. 6/ 

adapted to accomplish particular ends. Some might share 
the common gifts and yet enjoy the privilege of a special 
endowment, the Holy Spirit ^^ dividing to every man sever- 
ally as He will."^ In the exercise of His sovereign choice 
of means, He "Who spake by the Prophets," among whom 
are to be numbered the Apostles and all others whom He 
employed as the instruments of His authoritative teaching, 
conferred this peculiar honor. 

At the outstart, their method of instruction was oraL 
Prior sermo qtcam liber : prior senstcs qt^ain styhcs.'' The 
message which they were commissioned to proclaim was 
designated either as " the Gospel " or as " the Word of 
God.*' " Repent ye and believe the Gospel,**^ was our Lord's 
commandment to the people who "pressed upon Him to 
hear the Word of God ;" ^ and such was the message of the 
apostolic ministry, delivered with less reserve, enlarged, 
developed and enforced by " the demonstration of the 
Spirit and of power." ^ 

The Word of God, which was the matter of their mes- 
sage, was not blazoned upon parchments, but was a con- 
crete manifestation of acts, thoughts and purposes of divine 
origin. It was God's love addressing the world in sign- 
language. As a revelation, it had reference to the facts 
of history, of which the apostles and prophets had personal 
knowledge, of teachings which they had received from the 
Lord, of spiritual functions with w^hich they had been in- 
vested by Him, and of observances which He had com- 
manded them to teach.^ It was a revelation of divine wis- 
dom, power and love, " written not with ink, but with the 
Spirit of the living God ; not in tables of stone, but in 
fleshy tables of the heart." ^ The distinction between a 

' I Cor. xii. II. 2 Tertullian : De Testimonio Aniincc^ c. 5. 

3 St. Mark i. 15. 4 St. Luke v. i. s i Cor. ii. 4. 

^ St. Matt, xxviii. 20. 7 2 Cor. iii. 3. 



68 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

revelation and a record or history of it reduced to writing, 
is evident. The Christian revelation was by Jesus Christ. 
The knowledge of it was by the Holy Spirit. The percep- 
tion of it by the Church was at the beginning by the inter- 
posed agency of an oral ministration under the Spirit's 
control. The truth is infallibly delivered, whatever the 
means of delivery which the Spirit, in the exercise of His 
prerogative, may elect to employ. Its infallibility depends, 
not upon the organ of its delivery, but upon the authority 
of Him Who uses any organ as an instrumentality. Men 
spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, and the 
Word of God was conveyed with unerring accuracy and 
spiritual power to those who heard it gladly. The depos- 
itum of essential truth was germinally complete and suffi- 
cient to the immediate wants of the Church, independently 
of any other instrumentality whatsoever. The Holy Spirit 
had fulfilled the promise of our Lord. The Church had 
received the unction from above, and knew all things im- 
plicitly at least, as she would know them explicitly so soon 
as the Spirit should minister profounder instruction in the 
schools of heresy and persecution ; knew all things, not 
as if she had become omniscient, but by apprehending and 
teaching the facts and truths of the Gospel, in all their har- 
mony and interdependency, as the means of salvation. 
Revelation was an accomplished fact, rotund and perfect, 
and the Church was ecdesia docens before a page of the New 
Testament had been written. 

The influence of the Holy Spirit of Pentecost, as it was 
brought to bear upon the ministry of the nascent Church, 
was a peculiar influence, because it had reference to spe- 
cial ends. The delivery of the Word of God without error 
necessitated a degree of superintendence or guidance cor- 
respondingly exact. Without any violence done to their 
individuality or freedom, the chosen organs of the Spirit 



THE DA V OF PENTECOST. 69 

were controlled men. They were willing instruments for the 
furtherance of the Gospel. To their experimental knowl- 
edge of its objective contents was added a confirmation 
in their own souls of its spiritual reality. As the radiant 
light of Pentecost dawned upon them, all the irresolution, 
obtuseness and unbelief that had taxed the patience of 
their IMaster evaporated, and they rejoiced in new concep- 
tions of the truth and new experiences of its power. Free, 
yet controlled, they announced divine truths in purely 
human speech. " Endued w4th power from on high," they 
remembered all things whatsoever the Lord had said unto 
them, especially those sayings of the forty days that pre- 
ceded His Ascension,^ which "contain within them the germ 
of everything most precious to Christians in knowledge, 
privilege and comfort."^ They were so directed and in- 
spired that when they spoke, they spoke " not in the words 
which man's wisdom teacheth, but vrhich the Holy Ghost 
teacheth."^ The Spirit Who taught them influenced them 
to teach the Church the contents of revelation in all its 
essential outlines with infallible accuracy. 

Of the nature and extent of this influence we know but 
little. As we have already seen, the mode of the Spirit's 
psychological contact with the mind is a mystery. It was 
a special gift — possibly in kind, possibly only in degree — 
and its exercise in relation to oral teaching was temporary, 
because the exigency which required it was transient. Of 
its existence we have no reason, a p7'iori^ or a posteriori^ to 
entertain a doubt. The ecumenical mind of the Church 
has always recognized it as a sure-guiding superintendence, 
but has steadily declined to construct a theory of it. The 



^ St. Matt, xxviii. 9, 10, 16, 20 ; St. Mark xvi. 14-18; St. Luke xxiv, 
36-49; St. John XX. 14-23, and 26-29; St. John xxi. 15-22. 
2 Bishop Moberley. 3 i Cor. ii. 13. 



JO CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

reality of an influence, suited to secure a given result, fol- 
lows from the solemn guarantee of our Lord that the Spirit 
should teach the Church all things. That real influence 
is known, in theological /<^r/<^;2^^, as ^^Inspiration*' — a term 
which represents quite as much what we do not know as 
what we do know. The co-existence of a divine and a 
human element, each working freely, and, it may be, each 
with different, though not contradictory motive, is recog- 
nized, and must be, unless we would fall into error. The 
tremendous philippic of Coleridge against the ^' Divina 
commedia of a superhuman ventriloquist " ^ was directed 
against a theory of inspiration which eliminated the free 
human element and made of it a mere harp in the hand 
of a harper. On the other hand, this one-sidedness, which 
exalts the divine at the expense of the human, has pro- 
duced a later extreme which would dismiss the Holy Spirit 
from the scene, and reduce the Scriptures to a humanistic 
basis. The problem of the harmonious co-operation of the 
divine and human, each working freely, is not peculiar to 
the subject. The difficulty emerges everywhere. It is 
enough for one who recognizes the lordship of the Head 
of the Church to know that by His promised Spirit He will 
choose His Own modus agendz, and that it will be the wisest 
way. There is danger in being wise above what is written. 
A self-sufficient spirit is the pedagogue to doubt and un- 
belief.^ 

But the special influence of the Holy Spirit upon those 
who were chosen to deliver truth was but one step toward 
the formation of the Catholic Faith. Doctrine delivered 

^ *' Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit." Coleridge's Works, Harper's 
edit., vol. v., pp. 592, 593. 

2 '* Individual writers may have speculated; imagery, suitable or un- 
suitable, may have been introduced as illustrative by a few thinkers in 
early ages; but the Catholic Church has never put forward a theory. 



THE DA V OF PENTECOST. /I 

must be received. The infallible teaching must be sup- 
plemented by the influence of the same Spirit upon the 
mind of the whole Church. As a special influence had 
secured delivery, a special influence secured perception 
and reception. Catholic Dogma began to exist because 
the Catholic Church, whose sole prerogative it is, began 
to perceive it. Then, in the very nature of the case, the 
Church's perception of the Body of Doctrine thus taught 
at once assumed definite expression in language, which 
would soon crystallize into "a form of sound words." The 
baptismal formula commanded by our Lord contained in 
itself the germs of all subsequent symbolism — a fact which 
there is good reason to believe early suggested itself to the 
Church. As the '^ Our Father " was the germ-cell of litur- 
gical worship, this formula of the nev/-birth was the model 
of further formulations of doctrine. The truths which 
were necessary to produce the conversion of sinners to 
God ; to unite converts with the Body of Christ ; to secure 
to them the forgiveness of sin ; to convey to them the Holy 
Ghost ; to sustain them in the divine life, and to restore 

On this subject she has always maintained a solemn reserve; she de- 
clares to us that in the Scripture the Koly Spirit speaks to us by the 
mouths of men; she permits us to recognize a divine and a human ele- 
ment; but, in reference to the nature, extent and special circumstances 
of the union, she warns us not to seek to be wise above what has been 
written, not to endanger our faith with speculations and conjectures 
about that which has. not been revealed. Theories of inspiration are 
what scepticism is ever craving for; it is the voice of hapless unbelief 
that is ever loudest in its call for explanation of the manner of the as- 
sumed union of the divine with the human, or of the proportions in 
which each element is to be admitted and recognized. Such explana- 
tions have not been vouchsafed, and it is as vain and unbecoming to 
demand them as it is to require a theory of the union of the Divinity 
and Humanity in the Person of Christ, or an estimate of the propor- 
tions in which the two Natures are to be conceived to co-exist." — 
*Aids to Faith." Essay IX., pp. 473, 474. 



72 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

them when lapsed ; and, indeed, all the essential truths of 
the Gospel, demonstrated, expounded, illustrated, and 
enforced by the burning zeal and intellectual power of 
inspired teachers, teaching orally, found a sacred place in 
the heart of the Church and an intelligible form in its mind/ 

From all this it is evident that Christianity wa% pri- 
marily, an oral revelation. The writings contained in our 
New Testament were not yet in existence. That God 
Who, in time past, spake unto the fathers by the prophets, 
hath spoken in these last days by His Son,^ and this inde- 
pendence upon documentary records continued during the 
first contact of the teaching Spirit with the chosen subjects 
of His inspiration. There are urgent reasons why this pal- 
pable fact should be kept in mind. Jewish bibliolatry has 
its parallel in our day, and this excess has engendered, by 
its unreasonableness, much of the doubt and uncertainty 
which exist among Christian people. It has represented 
the Bible as being itself the Christian revelation, inspira- 
tion as a gift having exclusive reference to its composition, 
and the Church as founded upon it ; whereas the Church 
was in existence, with all its instrumentalities, in successful 
operation ; and, moreover, the Holy Spirit had delivered 
the substantial elements of revealed truth, and the Church 
had received and believed these, anterior to the production 
of a single roll of sacred v/riting by the hand of an in- 
spired penman. 

A calm survey of the history of the first age is the suffi- 
cient corrective of these errors, which really discredit the 
written Word while seeking to magnify and honor it. 

^ See evidence of early formulas of doctrine in Blunt, ** Dictionary 
of Doctrinal and Historical Theology," Art, *' Creeds." 
2 Hebrews i. i. 



THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 73 



CHAPTER X. 

THE HOLY SCRIPTURES— THEIR RELATION' TO THE 
SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH, 

THE opening chapter of the history of our religion has 
revealed to our view ^' the Lord and Giver of life *' 
engaged in teaching an ecumenical faith and impressing it 
upon the ecumenical mind of the Church by the primary 
use of the oral ministrations of the apostolic ministry — 
holy men of old speaking as they were moved by the Holy 
Ghost. But a change was to take place. The Spirit in 
selecting this as His first m.ethod did not thereby forestall 
Himself from employing other means. All the teachings 
which we find in the Gospels and in the more didactic 
portions of the New Testament were indeed taught by the 
mouths of apostles and prophets before they were com- 
mitted to writing, but He Who inspired men to speak, 
could also inspire them to write whenever He should de- 
termine to do so for the furtherance of His holy mission. 
It was not a novelty in the relation of God to the Church 
that He should cause messages that had been delivered 
orally to be reduced to writing. It was to be anticipated 
that He would do so again, a like necessity arising. Our 
Lord seemed to prepare the way by Himself drawing from 
the fountains of the Old Testament. Even after His resur- 
rection He rebuked His foolish disciples, " slow of heart 
to believe all that the prophets have spoken," " and begin- 
ning at Moses and all the prophets. He expounded unto 
them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself."^ 
' St. Luke xxiv. 25-27. 



74 



CATHOLIC DOGMA. 



And St. Peter, in the first sermon which was preached after 
the Pentecostal effusion, immediately referred his hearers 
to "that which was spoken by the prophet Joel/' as recorded 
in their Old Testament.^ 

Having committed the deposit of truth to the custody 
of the Church's sanctified intelligence by the agency of 
holy men speaking as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, 
how was this sacred treasure to be retained in her posses- 
sion, preserved in its integrity, and handed down purely 
to all the coming generations ? There are, it would seem, 
four conceivable methods of procedure by which the 
Author of truth might have accomplished His purpose. 

First. — He might have immortalized the oral agents. 
But although the agency of inspired speech, as a means of 
contact with the ecclesiastica intelligentia^ was antecedent to 
any other, it is evident that it was not intended to be the 
permanent means of authoritative teaching. The peculiar 
gift which insured an infallible delivery of truth was con- 
fined to its first subjects, and these were mortal men. The 
common lot was theirs, and ere the century elapsed all of 
the Apostles, and probably all others of the original minis- 
try, had passed hence. Through the laying on of their 
hands others were to succeed them, by divine arrangement," 
in order that certain of their functions might be perpetu- 
ated to the end of the dispensation, but not to inherit that 
special gift, which was a temporary one. 

Second. — He might have extended the special gift of in- 
spiration in such extent as to constitute it an individual 
endowment perpetuated throughout all history. 

Third. — He might have committed the truth to the 

ordinary process of tradition, by which history is handed 

down from one generation to another among peoples who 

are without written records. But this expedient would 

^ Acts ii. i6 ; Joel ii. 2S-32. 



THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 



75 



have been attended with two fatal difficulties : i. The im- 
possibility of keeping the original tradition separate from 
the natural processes of the mind, with its strong powers 
of imagination, the fallibility of its mnemonic faculty, and 
its tendency to exaggerate or minimize, as self-interest may 
dictate. This difficulty exists even in regard to the opera- 
tions of the Holy Spirit in the individual soul. While there 
may be a peaceful consciousness of the indwelling of the 
Dove, there cannot be such a specific apprehension of His 
influence as that one shall be able to distinguish without 
error or confusion that which is natural and that which is 
supernatural ; that which is from within, and that which 
is from above. An external criterion has been found 
necessary to guard the individual from error and fanati- 
cism. The necessity would have been even greater in this 
instance, lest the pure tradition of the first age should 
speedily have become a mass of incredible myths. 2. The 
impossibility of preserving a harmonious tradition. The 
idea of the Church differs from that of natural religion. 
Segregation is the tendency in nature, but the Church is 
an inclusion of diversities unto harmonization. Thus St. 
Paul says, "As the body is one, and hath many members, 
and all the members of that one body, being many, are one 
body ; so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all bap- 
tized into one body, ^ ^ * and have been all made to 
drink into one Spirit."^ Then follows that graphic illus- 
tration of the foot, the hand, the ear, and the eye, in which 
he shows how these parts, with their proper functions, are 
necessary each to the other, and how God hath tempered 
the comely and uncomely parts together that there should 
be no schism in the body, but that the members should 
have the same care one for another. The turbulent annals 
of religious controversy testify the persistence with which 
^ I Cor. xii. 12, 13. 



76 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

the human element in the Mystical Body has resisted the 
strivings of the Divine, till the pure gold of charity has 
become dim and the most fine gold changed. Had it not 
been for the dominant presence of the Holy Spirit in the 
Church, the truth would long since have been buried be- 
neath the contentions of the schools and the corruptions 
of philosophy falsely so-called. Much more rapid and dis- 
astrous would have been the encroachment of error and 
the destruction of unity had the primitive body of truth 
been left to the uncertainty of an uncontrolled natural 
tradition. 

Fourth, — He might have exerted a strong superintend- 
ence over the mind of the Church upon which He had 
already impressed the truth, so as to preserve and perpetu- 
ate it in its purity, and, for an external help and corro- 
boration, especially in the ages to come after the inspired 
ministry had ceased to speak, caused the substance of it 
to be reduced to writing by agents selected for the duty 
and guided in its discharge. Thus the stream of tradition, 
of which St. Paul makes mention,^ the product equally of 
an inspired ministry orally delivering, and of an inspired 
Church receiving, would flow purely through the genera- 
tions, the Lord caring for His Own truth. ^ And this was 
the method which our Lord actually selected as the means 
by which to perpetuate the original deposit. 

Hence the writings which constitute our New Testament 
were called into being as one of the means of the Spirit. 

The guiding control exercised by the Holy Spirit upon 
the inspired writers, identical as to its mode, nature and 
extent with that which was employed when they acted as 
oral teachers, was equally consistent with their free indi- 

^ 2 Thess. ii. 15, and iii. 6. 
2 " In strictness of speech Scripture is Tradition, written Tradition." 
— Bishop Kaye," Ecclesiastical History," p. 299. 



THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 



77 



viduality ; and this is evident in the perfectly natural and 
immediate character of the motive which consciously im- 
pelled them to write. Thus St. Matthew wrote with par- 
ticular reference to the prejudices of his own countrymen ; 
St. Mark probably at the suggestion of St. Peter ; St. Luke 
for the enlightenment of his friend Theophilus, and St. 
John near the close of the first century, to supplement the 
other Gospels. Local and personal reasons gave rise to 
the Epistles and the Apocalypse. More extended was the 
vision and larger the motive of the all-animating and holy 
Spirit of wisdom, Who looked beyond the immediate ex- 
igency, and, in order to perpetuate the substance of the 
apostolic teachings to the Church of the coming ages by 
some outward record of that which He would keep per- 
petually fresh in the interior mind of the Church, provided 
that, while the writers were acting without compulsion, His 
gift of inspiration should stereotype those teachings and 
commit the plates to the Church, v/hich was to be their 
Witness and Keeper, and, by His inward illumination, their 
Interpreter. 

These several writings, coming into existence one by 
one, became the property of the Church. Into her hands 
they were received ; by her custody they were preserved ; 
in her light they were interpreted, and afterwards, in the 
fourth century, by her discriminating insight, they were 
separated from the uninspired Christian literature. They 
did not rise like a creative power upon a scene of chaos 
to call her into existence, to determine her doctrine, to 
dictate her polity, to issue her commission, or to adjudi- 
cate her controversies ; but rather they supervened upon 
a completely systematized order, and could do no more 
than mingle their supplementary influence with the fully- 
developed life of the universal Church. Oral instruction 
had, in the necessity of things, given rise to a body of doc- 



78 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

trine, of the existence of which the writings furnish numer- 
ous intimations.^ As this was handed from one to another 
it beame a sacred tradition, circulating through the Church 
as a divinely taught depositum. To this the writings were 
added, not as superior, but as subsidiary to it. It was the 
Faith taught by men who spake by the Holy Ghost, and 
perceived by the Church through the same Spirit. Hence 
the Scriptures were not for verifying the tradition ; on the 
contrary, the tradition was the only means by which the 
Church could verify the Scriptures. Prior in point of 
time and more ample in point of volume, it necessari- 
ly became the criterion by which the Scriptures were 
judged. 

As this mass of writings was addressed to the divinely- 
organized Body of Christ, which was one, and which was 
designed to remain one for all time, it was not essential to 
its integrity as a series of inspired papers — historical, doc- 
trinal and prophetical — that it should contain, as a consti- 
tution, every feature of the Church's life in minute detail. 
The Church's life was rather a constitution to it, so that its 
silences, its incidental allusions, its apparent discrepancies, 
its incomplete presentations of particular subjects, were 
divested of any inconvenience by the practical expedient 
of immediate reference to the actual belief or practice of 
the Church, just as one might fill up the details of a con- 
temporaneous history of our country by drawing from the 
abounding sources of information around us. 

It would have been an absurd if it had been a possible 
thing for a convert to have rejected the Apostles' fellow- 
ship because the Scriptures to which he had access were 
not of the nature of a detailed constitution on the subject; 
or, for still another to deny their inspiration because they 

^ Rom. vi. 17; 2 St. Peter ii. 21; St. Jiide iii. ; 2 Tim. i. 13, 14; 2 
Tim. ii. ; i Tim. vi. 20 ; 2 St. John vi. 7, 9. 



THE HOLY SCRIPTURES, 79 

did not claim it ; or, for some literalist to protest against 
the incorporation of little children into the Body of Christ 
because only inferential authority could be found in any 
of the parchments or rolls that were circulating through 
the churches ; or, for another to reject the representative 
priesthood because no writer had given the title to the 
ministry directly, and but one indirectly ^ ; or, for another 
to adhere to the Jewish Sabbath because the writings con- 
tained no record of any abrogation thereof ; or, for some 
priest to refuse to communicate women at the weekly 
Breaking of Bread because nothing had been written on 
the subject ; or, for any one to isolate the Scriptures from 
their proper surroundings, and then constitute them the 
one only, final, and exclusive criterion of truth. It would 
have been an absurdity; it is as absurd now. For the Holy 
Spirit did not bestow the sacred wTitings upon the Church 
to take the place of that revealed system of truth and prac- 
tice which He had just consolidated, but rather to supply 
to Himself a means by which He might guide the Church 
in her fuller perception of the truth, and supply to her an 
inspired remembrancer in the coming days when the voice 
of a living inspired ministry was to be heard no longer. 
The writings take the Church and its developed system — 
its faith, its polity, its customs, its genius — for granted, 
and they can be correctly interpreted only in the light of 
this truth. Containing the substance of revelation to such 
an extent that only that should be regarded as essential 
which " may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy 
Scripture,"^ as read in the light of history and the Church, 
they do not contain all the details of essential truth. The 
consequence is apparent. We must throw upon these also 
the illuminating light which flows from the Seven Lamps 

^ Rom. XV. i6, ministering — iepovfDyovvra. 
2 "Articles of Relijrion," Art. viii. 



8o CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

of the Spirit^ burning in the Church. There is no longer 
any access to a living oracle, an inspired organ of infalli- 
bility, such as the apostolic ministry was ; but much still 
continues among us which passed from the organs of de- 
livery in the first age to the custody of the Church, and 
became a fixed portion of its heritage to all the future. 
Bearing the stamp of the ecumenical mind impressed upon 
it by the Holy Spirit, it should be recognized with grati- 
tude, and should be employed as a means whereby the 
individual reader may understand the holy writings. To 
neglect or refuse this guidance is to fall into error and to 
take the shortest path to separatism. There were such 
persons at the first. In the general epistles of St. John we 
read of some who would not remain faithful to the truth 
"which ye have heard from the beginning.''^ " They went 
out from us.'* It was the natural consequence of rejec- 
tion of the apostolic doctrine that the apostolic fellowship 
should be renounced. In the same passage the venerable 
Apostle illustrates the relation of his inspired writings to 
the Church when he says : " I have not written unto you 
because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it."^ 
The Scriptures were for reminder and confirmation in re- 
^ The Holy Spirit '* is represented under the emblem of lamps burn- 
ing before the Mercy-Seat or throne, on account of that spiritual and 
saving illumination which He affords unto the Church. All the rays 
of supernatural light with which she has been favored were from the 
Spirit. ' Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Spirit.' 
The same adorable Person, acting as the Spirit of inspiration, guided 
the pens of those whom He employed to commit the revelation of the 
mind of God unto writing. He also continues by His influence and 
operation as the Spirit of truth, to open up and expound to the minds 
of the saints [the collective Church] those things which the inspired 
penman had written." — The Rev. Robert Culbertson : Lectures on the 
Book of Revelation, vol. ii., p. 34. Edinburgh, 1826. 

2 I St. John ii. 7. 

3 I St. John ii. 21. 



THE HOLY SCRIPTURES, 8 1 

spect of that which was already in the custody and knowl- 
edge of the Ghurch. 

The Church and the Book must not be separated. They 
supplement and interpenetrate each other as ordained of 
God to perpetuate the Gospel and diffuse its blessings. 
But the statement thus made is incomplete until we add 
the thought to which our subject constantly leads us. 
Neither the Church nor the Book are competent to secure 
these benign spiritual results, except the Holy Spirit charge 
them with His vital force and employ them under the sub- 
lime purposes of His mission as means of imparting life 
and knowledge. He Who bestowed an influence upon the 
agents of an oral inspiration continued it when they acted 
in their capacity as authors of the sacred writings, but He 
has also endowed the whole body of the Church with an 
influence by which there has been developed a common 
and unanimous perception of the truth. Thus Catholic 
Dogma comes to have the imprimatur of universal accept- 
ance, and, being a real product of the influence of the Holy 
Ghost (which, if we choose, we may call " inspiration ") 
as truly as the oral or written teachings of the primitive 
ministry, deduced from and representing these as means 
which the Holy Spirit used to that end, is binding upon 
the conscience of all who loyally recognize the authority 
of our Lord Jesus Christ in the realm of revealed truth. 

To the Book belongs a high place of honor. ''' The Bible 
is the diamond that sparkles on the bosom of the Church.'* 
Its relations to the faith are unspeakably important. Of 
its devotional value, of its supernatural power as a minis- 
trant to sinning and sorrowing humanity in all the exigen- 
cies of life, of its influence upon the intellectual life of the 
world, whole libraries have been written. Our subject, 
however, confines our attention to its relation to the dog- 
matic faith. Because written under the authority of the 



82 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

one Lord, by the inspiration of the one Spirit, it contains 
the one Faith of the Church. That unity shines out in 
every book and chapter of it. The central thoughts dom- 
inate throughout. As has been strikingly said, ^^ it is as a 
Gothic temple, in which even the apparent caprices of 
architecture and ornamentation constitute, in connection 
with the whole, one beauty more. And the form of the 
Cross is everywhere to be traced. But at the same time 
the value of the different parts is determined by the rela- 
tion of each one to the central thought of the whole." ^ 

^ Van Osterzee : ** Dogmatics/' p. i6g. 



INFALLIBLE PERCEPTION OF TRUTH. 83 



CHAPTER XL 

INFALLIBLE PERCEPTION OF TRUTH NOT THE 
ENDOWMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 

RECOGNIZING the imperial position of our Lord 
Jesus Christ within the realm of supernatural reve- 
lation, we are led on to perceive that He discharges His 
prophetic function through the vicariate of the Holy Ghost, 
and that the Holy Ghost impresses the essential contents 
of revelation upon the mind of the Church by various 
agencies, but chiefly by an inspired oral ministration, and 
an inspired record of the substance of that ministration ; 
and, further, that the ultimate test of the infallibility of all 
agencies is that ecumenicity of perception and acknowl- 
edgment, which is also the gift of the Holy Ghost to the 
Body of Christ. Led by these statements of method, we 
no sooner make search for that which would inevitably be 
their outcome than we discover the existence of a Body of 
Catholic Dogma whose universal acceptance is an acknowl- 
edged fact. Now, this undisputed fact challenges the mind 
to inquire how these dogmas, standing out like huge sun- 
lit promontories to the gaze of all who will open their eyes 
upon their splendor, could have gained their hold without 
some interposition of Divine Power. What means this 
giant consent, whose long arms so cleanly sweep into its 
motherly bosom all the various types of Christian life, all 
the rarest fruits of character, all the varieties of mankind, 
ethnic and intellectual, and even all the contentious saints 
of the later Ebal and Gerizim, but that this is, indeed, the 



84 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

divinely chosen and guided method by which the Church 
may know, with moral unanimity, the things which are most 
surely believed among us ? It was this supreme fact of 
" one faith'* which impressed the mind of Irenaeus' with its 
magnificence. It was this same fact v/hich led Tertullian^ 
to say : " Suppose that all churches had erred ; that the 
apostle was deceived in giving his testimony ; that the 
Holy Spirit, Who for this very thing, was sent by Christ, 
sought from the Father to be the teacher of truth, regarded 
no church so as to lead it into the truth ; that the Steward 
of God, the Vicar of Christ, neglected His office, permit- 
ting the churches to understand and to believe differently 
from what He Himself had preached by the Apostles — is 
it probable {verisimile) that so many and so great churches 
would have stumbled into one faith ? '* 

There is but one door of escape from so absurd a con- 
clusion. It opens upon those counsels of infinite wisdom 
whereby our Lord, Who is the Head of the Body, purposes 
to make no schism in the Body by preferring one member 
above another, but contemplates them as existing in a ma- 
jestic unity, so that each individual may perceive the faith 
with positive assurance of certainty by ascertaining and 
accepting the perceptions of the Corporate Whole. 

1 * ' The Church disseminated over all the world, having received this 
preaching and this faith, preserves it diligently, as the inhabitants of 
the same house believe them alike, as having the same soul and heart, 
and teach and preach and deliver them alike, as having the same 
mouth ; for, though their languages are unlike, the virtue of tradition 
is one and the same, and neither do the churches which are founded 
in Germany believe or deliver otherwise than those which were consti- 
tuted in Spain, in France, in the Orient, in Egypt, in Africa, in the 
middle of the world ; but as one and the same sun shines through the 
whole world, so does the light and preaching of the truth, in everyplace, 
where it is received, disperse itself." — Ircnocus, lib i., cap. 3. 

2 Tertullian, De Prdescript. HcXrct. c. 27, 28. 



INFALLIBLE PERCEPTION OF TRUTH. 85 

Both within and without the pale of our holy religion, 
however, there are to be found many who are not willing 
to accept the induction of Irenaeus and Tertullian's con- 
clusion. Truth is an uncompromising antagonist, and 
must, in turn, meet the challenge of sturdy foes. 

In noticing these adverse claims, we shall first consider 
the assertion, which in our age more clamorously than ever 
is put forth, to the effect that there resides in each individ- 
ual a competency to perceive truth with sufficient distinct- 
ness, and that there is no necessity for any tribunal of 
infallible delivery. 

Such is practically the rationalist's claim. With self- 
sufficient egotism he announces that every man, every son 
of nature, carries truth, like a star, in his brain.^ The 
assumption is that it is competent for a single created 
mind to comprehend truth in all its infinite ramifications — 
a proposition as irreverent as it is impracticable. Philos- 
ophy, viewed as an attempt to formulate a science of all 
things, simply expresses the vain aspiration of the human 
mind to be as God, omniscient ; and some of the saddest 
episodes in the history of modern thought have exhibited 
the penalties which await so arrogant an ambition. Intel- 
lectual audacity wins admirers, however, while its day lasts ; 
and it is to be feared that the oracular tone of such sages 
as that one who said : " Once leave your own knowledge 
of God, your own sentiments, and take secondary knowl- 
edge * * * and you get wider from God every year this 
secondary form lasts/'- meets a sympathetic echo from 
many Christians, who, through an exaggerated estimate 
placed upon the assumed rights of individual judgment, 
have contracted grossly incorrect notions of its scope and 
jurisdiction. For this right — which is rather, under proper 
restrictions, a duty — by no means implies the right to throw 

I Alger: *' Hist. Doct. Future Life." Preface, p. ii. 2 Emerson. 



86 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

one's self back into a state of Cartesian doubtfulness of 
everything, in order that the mind may rise by processes 
of mathematical demonstration to the perception of the 
truth. It is impossible for any individual thus to become 
a law to himself. Des Cartes failed, the Cartesians failed, 
all the philosophers fail to accomplish it. Even the prop- 
osition that 2 + 2=4 requires the mind to accept testimony 
external to itself. The ultimate authority before which we 
must bow is not lodged in any single brain or heart. Had 
it been otherwise, we should long since have discovered 
and prostrated ourselves before it. No such enthroned 
autocrat exists. Even in the order of nature we are all 
members one of another, so interrelated and bound to- 
gether in a social unity, that separated individual discov- 
ery of truth is impossible ; and hence attempts at independ- 
ence appear unreasonable, if not ridiculous. For he who 
assumes an individual solitary search for truth seems much 
to resemble the little pipe hid away among the registers of 
a magnificent organ which utters its thin, petty, whistling 
note, as if to represent the orchestral harmony of the full 
instrument. The actual results of this individualism in 
acquiring truth are enough to condemn the method. As 
when many little pipes mingle their independent notes in 
one confused jargon of discords, so we find among us the 
most chaotic diversity of opinions, the weary strife of 
wrangling schools, and endless Babel confusion, with no 
deficiency of mutual anathema. The tired world longs for 
some harmonizing authority, but does not seem to see the 
Master sitting at the key-board ready to bring out the 
music of each pipe by weaving its note into the harmony 
of the whole organ. 

But is there, witJiin the pale of the supernatural kingdom 
of heaven, any prerogative of individual infallibility That 
our Lord Who, during His earthly ministry, had been the 



INFALLIBLE PERCEPTION OF TRUTH. 



87 



fountain of authoritative teaching, and had, for reasons of 
divine expediency, departed from visible association with 
His Church, that in it He might inaugurate the methods 
and means of the Holy Spirit, not so conspicuous to the 
senses, but more efficacious in reaching the wide realm of 
catholicity ; that He should immediately proceed to qualify 
each individual, or any one individual to perceive the 
truth infallibly, would not only seem to be incongruous 
with the avowed purpose of His withdrawal, but would 
seem to argue that the mission of the Spirit and the insti- 
tution of an Ecdesia Docens were superfluous.^ Moreover, 
the results are against the theory ; for every error recorded 
in history, every fanatical extravagance, every schism has 
been due to a reliance on inward illumination without the 
stay and guidance of divinely-provided external testimony. 
The pretensions of the individual, whether he be the Mys- 
tic, the Illuminist, or the Infallibilist (pope or private inter- 
preter of the Scriptures), must therefore be excluded. 
Away with dreams, opinions, guesses, intuitions, oracles, 
decrees ex cathedra! The more urgently they claim to 
speak with authority, the more explicitly must we dismiss 
them from the scene, nor welcome their return until they 

1 " ' Keep (quoth he, St. Paul to Timothy) the depositujit.^ What is 
meant by this depositutn? — that is, that which is committed to thee, 
not that which is invented of thee ; that which thou hast received, not 
that which thou hast devised ; a thing not of wit, but of learning ; not 
of private assumption, but of public tradition ; a thing brought to thee, 
not brought forth of thee ; wherein thou must not be an author, but a 
keeper ; not a founder, but an observer ; not a leader, but a follower. 
Keep the depositum, quoth he. Preserve the talent of the Catholic Faith 
safe and undiminished ; that which is committed to thee, let that re- 
main with thee, and that deliver. Thou hast received gold, render them 
gold; I will not have one thing for another ; I wqll not have thee for 
gold render either impudently lead, or craftily brass : I will not the 
show, but the very nature of gold itself." — St. Vincent of Lerins. Com- 
monitorium I. xxii. 



88 CA THOLIC DOGMA, 

have bowed submissively to the Corporate Unity under the 
compulsion of that all-embracing force, or archetypal prin- 
ciple of Pentecost, "and all that believed were together 
and had all things common/'^ In one word, the gift of 
inspiration is not individual. There is, indeed, a kind of 
influence, such as is mentioned in the Collect for the fifth 
Sunday after Easter, where we pray : " Grant to us Thy 
holy inspiration, that we may think those things that are 
good, and by Thy merciful guiding may perform the same/' 
But manifestly this has no reference to the infallible ac- 
quisition of dogmatic knowledge. It has an ethical, rather 
than doctrinal bearing. 

And yet, in deprecating the assumptions of individual- 
ism, we must disclaim the remotest intention of casting any 
discredit upon the relations of the Holy Spirit to the indi- 
vidual soul. Inconceivably great are the privileges w^hich 
He confers upon the Christian ; whose body is His temple ; 
whose prayers are His intercessions ; whose sanctity is the 
token of His beautifying power ; whose hope is in His 
promise ; but by no possible latitude of construction can 
these blessings and honors be interpreted as constituting him 
an infallible organ to whom truth is revealed, and by whom 
it may be dogmatically announced. Is it not passing 
strange how often the noblest minds have failed to per- 
ceive that it is one thing to be the subject of the sacra- 
mental and other ordinary influences of the Holy Spirit, and 
another thing to become the organ of His plenary teaching? 
What utter confusion of thought is involved in these words 
of a late Scotch Bishop, whose lovely life and death almost 
sanctify the mists and clouds of his theology :" What we want 
above all," he says, " is this, that men who are alive to the 
progress of tlie age, who, in the hidden retirement of their 
lives, arc walking with God in the newness of the present 
■ I Acts ii. 44. 



INFALLIBLE PERCEPTION OF TRUTH. 



89 



light, would simply tell us what they have seen and heard. 
We do not want the fancies of ambitious writers ; we do 
not want the repetition of old formulcEj but could not 
some organization be formed by means of which we could 
ascertain the experiences of trained watchers in the realm 
of the spirit ? We are journeying, no doubt, on one great 
highway, but there is a path which each one treads for 
himself alone. What has any one really found there — any 
one who has been endeavoring to follow the living Christ — 
and who has not merely been looking back to the light of 
other days.'* ^Watchman! what of the night ?'"^ This 
almost pathetic cry for an " oganization " comes from a 
chief minister of that divine organism which is just the 
means by which we may ascertain the experiences of 
trained watchers in the realm of the spirit ! and he who 
wants no more repetition of old formidcz is ready to hail 
as light from heaven the illumination that bursts upon any 
lonely traveler lost in the mazes of speculation, or wander- 
ing in the moonlit regions of sentiment ! It is a question 
worth considering why a fatuity so striking should sweep 
like a contagion through the world, paralyzing faith and 
destroying humility. It is not difficult to perceive that there 
should rise a rebellion of mind and heart against doctrines 
and opinions which, in the near past, have been proclaimed 
as true with misguided zeal, mounting at times to the 
height of intolerant bigotry, and even enshrined in local 
formularies in close union with eternal truths, but which 
have been wholly devoid of claim upon the conscience of 
the Catholic Church. But the marvel is that minds which 
are so alert to perceive the defect of these claims, and so 
brilliant in their exposure of it, should reject the results 
of one form of individualism only to substitute in its place 
I ** Life of Alexander Ewing, D.C.L., late Bishop of Argyll and the 
Isles." London, 1879. P. 435. 



90 



CATHOLIC DOGMA. 



another form quite as likely to go astray and misrepresent 
the truth. There is doubtless a fascination to many minds 
in making original searches for truth, but it is certainly 
inconsistent with the modesty of the true theologian ; and 
moreover, observation among this class of thinkers con- 
firms the suspicion that, rejecting the principle of author- 
ity in one direction, they do at once accept its rule in 
another without protest, seemingly jealous of the principle 
only when it puts upon them the duty of implicitly accept- 
ing Catholic truth. It is at all times likely to occur that 
spiritual inactivity shall set in, as custom robs truth of a 
certain glamor, and then new error becomes more attract- 
ive than old truth. The quietism of Molinos gained its 
adherents in Rome, not so much because of its intrinsic 
attractiveness as because religious sloth had robbed the 
old truths of their beauty and sacraments of their grace. 

Individual thought, study and investigation are rights 
not to be gainsayed. The doctors of the Church are her 
crown of rejoicing. It has not infrequently occurred that 
an individual has perceived and formulated a truth in such 
perfection of statement that the whole Church recognized 
and adopted it as expressing a component part of the 
Faith ; but the particular degree of illumination vouch- 
safed to an exceptionally great mind, and pure heart, and 
firm will, establishes no rule by which the divine contact 
with individuals is governed ; nor, indeed, does any author- 
ity dwell in the single voice that may haply express the 
truth. The happy utterance may have fallen from the lips 
of an individual, but the authority dwells rather in the 
consentient voice of the whole Church, upon whose con- 
sciousness, seusitized by the Holy Spirit, the statement 
photographs itself as very truth. It must not be forgotten 
for a moment by those who desire to contract and cherish 
clear views, that the divine thought seems to be to endov/ 



INFALLIBLE PERCEPTION OF TRUTH. qi 

men only with those qualifications which are essential to 
the discharge of their particular duties and the accom- 
plishment of their personal salvation ; and so seldom does 
an Athanasius arise, that we are forced to conclude the 
ordinary illumination of those who are in union with the 
Body of Christ to be limited to the individual rather than 
the collective necessities. 

This error, in regard to the competency of the individ- 
ual, is a seed than vrhich no other produces a harvest so 
speedy and so deplorable. It has not only developed an 
insufferable egotism, rising sometimes to the height of a 
spiritual pride that crushes Christian humility under its 
heel, but it has been the source in every age of schism and 
heresy. Its logical result is as many beliefs as there are 
minds to mistake their opinions for inspirations. The 
curse of Separatism — the scandal of Christendom, as it is 
the occasion of unbelief — is even more widespread and 
disastrous to-day than it was two hundred years ago when 
Bishop Beveridge wrote : " Hence these tears ; hence so 
many horrible schisms in the Church ! For, while individ- 
uals indulging beyond what is meet, their abilities, or rather 
their own wanton fancies, devote themiselves to the intro- 
duction of novelties into religion, all the people, through 
the infinite diversity of opinions, come to be rent into con- 
trary schools and factions.*' i 

I "Codex Canonum Ecles. Prim. Proemium." Lib. Anglo-Cath. 
Theology. Works of Bishop Beveridge, vol. xi. 



92 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 

MAY not the individual believer, however, attain un- 
erring results in the acquisition of Christian truth 
by his use of the inspired Scriptures ? 

There are special reasons in our ovv^n time, when a one- 
sided naturalistic spirit of criticism is conspiring with ani- 
mal forms of ruthless unbelief to cast contempt on the 
Holy Book, why we should studiously avoid any depreci- 
ation of it. At the same time, there is reason to believe 
that some of the rough usage which it encounters is due to 
its having been assigned a place relatively to other essen- 
tial things which the Spirit of inspiration did not design it 
to occupy. If this be the case, as we strongly think it is, 
then the best defence that can be offered in its behalf is to 
expose and acknowledge mistakes, and to indicate the 
position which properly belongs to it in the economy of 
the Holy Spirit. The sacred writings are worthy of our 
highest honor, but we do not honor them when we fail to 
perceive and accept with all its conclusions the palpable 
fact that at first, when the Church was already in existence 
and moving forward along her beneficent pathway, the 
Scriptures had not yet been called into being. They are 
the corona of gems that flashes upon the brow of the 
Church, but they are subordinate to the Church as it is to 
Christ. 

The Scriptures do not possess an ex opcre opc7'aio power 
to make infallible disclosure of the whole system of 



THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE INDIVIDUAL, 93 

revealed truth to any single mind. They constitute a 
priceless treasury of resources to the Christian in the 
direction of devotion, comfort, spiritual development and 
instruction. But that is not the point before us. As a 
criterion of all truth for the individual, they do not make 
the claim, nor give evidence that they possess the power, 
while the results which attend their attempted use as such 
demonstrate the futility and absurdity of it. It is not to 
the mind of the one but to the mind of the all that the full- 
orbed truth appears in perfect outline. 

But what if an afflatus of the Holy Spirit accompany 
the single mind in its study of the Sacred Word ? To 
concede the presumption, for a moment, the individual 
must still confront the impossibility of identifying the in- 
ward teaching of the Spirit as differentiated from the 
ordinary workings of the mind. The mystery that sur- 
rounds the operation of God in the soul is so great in all 
the gifts of the Spirit, whether ordinary or special, that even 
those who have made themselves willing recipients of His 
grace cannot distinguish between the natural process of 
their own minds and the supernatural inference that 
descends upon them. Hov/ perilous to attempt a task of 
discernment so delicate ! The annals of religion testify, 
with terrible emphasis, the penalties of such mistaken zeal. 
Many an enthusiast, from Montanus down, has attributed 
his earth-born zeal or his sensuous ecstasies to the impulse 
of the Divine Spirit. Many a mystic, from the Areopagite 
down, has mistaken his dreamy emotions for visions of the 
unutterable. On the other hand, the very gifts of grace 
have sometimes afforded a basis for the deceitful heart on 
which to build the Babel of its pride. It has not infre- 
quently been observed by those who readily discern spirits 
that Christians have grieved away the long-suffering "Lord 
and Giver of life " by regarding His sanctifying, illuminat- 



94 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

ing, and comforting ministrations as nothing else than self- 
culture secured by the use of their natural powers. Per- 
haps this disposition to confuse the divine with the human 
is still more patent with respect to the perception of the 
writers of Revelation. 

But neither can the individual mind identify in the Scrip- 
tures that factor of inspiration by which they are made the 
record of revelation. The influence of the Spirit upon the 
minds of the writers, v/hereby a trustworthy record of the 
facts and truths associated with the Incarnation was secured 
to the Church, was necessarily subject to limitations. As 
inspired organs of the Spirit they wrote as they were 
moved, being willing in the day of His power, but there is 
an entire lack of evidence to show that they were conscioics 
of peculiar endowments by which they were assured against 
error, nor was such consciousness necessary to secure the 
results which were desired. " There is no reason to believe 
that the operation of the Spirit in inspiration revealed itself 
any more in the consciousness of the sacred writers than 
His operations in sanctification reveal themselves in the 
consciousness of the Christian. As the believer seems to 
himself to act, and in fact does act out his own nature, so 
the inspired penmen wrote out of the fullness of their own 
thoughts and feelings, and employed the language and 
modes of expression which were most natural and appro- 
priate.*'^ If the fact of their inspiration, then, was one of 
which they were unconscious, and if the writings themselves 
made no such announcement, it is apparent that it was not 
the purpose of the Holy Ghost to establish the sacred writ- 
ings as His organ by which infallibly to guide the individual 
Christian into all truth. By what means, then, was the fact 
of their inspiration ascertained, and how did it come to be 
accepted, and how did we come to believe that the several 
^ "Systematic Theology," Charles Hodge, D.D., Vol. i. p. 157. 



THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 95 

writings now contained in the canon are to be received as 
** inspired?" The reply at once suggested by our subject 
is that the Spirit Who has holy relations to every soul, and 
peculiar relations to those who are called to any special 
function and honor (as, for example, to become inspired 
penmen), has plenary relations only to the whole Body of 
Christ, and hence that which does not certify itself to the 
consciousness of the individual becomes apparent to the 
consciousness of the corporate unity. The sacred writings 
did not reach the Church through the magisterial act of 
some external authority. On the contrary, history records 
that the Church, under the guidance of a fine inward in- 
stinct, the product of the Spirit's prophetic power, discerned 
the character of the inspired writings, and bore witness to 
their value as documents of a revelation already in exist- 
ence, which had been actually done and taught by our Lord 
Jesus Christ, and first delivered to her by oral ministra- 
tions ; and, in obedience to her corporate perceptions, 
sifted those several and separate writings out of the mass 
of Christian literature, and collated them into one holy 
volume of which she is custodian and witness, and by 
which she ever loves to guide her steps under the ordering 
of the Holy Ghost.' 

The Scriptures were addressed to the Church, which 
holds them in her custody. The Spirit Who inspired 
men to write them was the only agent competent to inter- 
pret them, and this interpretation was impressed upon the 
mind of the Catholic Church, with the result of a Body of 
Catholic Dogma. Had the Scriptures been addressed to 
each individual, with the promise of infallible guidance in 
their interpretation, the same result would have been 
reached. But that such a promise was not vouchsafed to 
the individual is evident, for individual interpretation with- 
I Hooker's Works, Vol. i. pp. 335, 375, Ed. Keble. 



9^ CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

out Catholic guidance produces more contradictions than 
agreements. It is, after all, not the Scriptures but his in- 
terpretation of them which the individual follows. " By 
their fruits ye shall know them." Results constitute the 
supreme argument. The Spirit of God was not sent to in- 
augurate a dispensation of endless contradiction. What 
St. Vincent of Lerins wrote applies well in our day : " All 
men do not understand the Scripture in one and the same 
sense, but divers men diversely. This man and that man, 
this way and that way, expound and interpret the sayings 
thereof. So that, to one's thinking, so many men, so many 
opinions almost may be gathered out of them. For Nova- 
tian expoundeth it one way, Photinus another, Sabellius 
after this sort, Donatus after that ; Arius, Eunomius, Mace- 
donius will have this exposition — Apollinaris and Priscillian 
will have that ; Jovinian, Pelagius, Celestius gather this 
sense ; and, to conclude, Nestorius findeth out that ; and 
therefore very necessary it is, for the avoiding of so great 
windings and turnings of errors so various, that the work 
of expounding the Prophets and Apostles shall be directed 
according to the rule of the ecclesiastical and Catholic 
sense.''^ That necessity exists to-day more urgently than 
ever before, more than in the anti-Nicene days, for never 
before has this error more persistently resisted universal 
truth, and more sadly illustrated the deliberation with 
which men, blind with the passions of the theological 
battle-field, have sacrificed unity and inflicted the curse of 
division upon Christianity. The story is a sad testimony 
to the earthenness of the vessels to whom so great treasure 
was committed. More deplorable still would the record 
be, did not the Soirit's work in the sanctification of the in- 
dividual soul fmd freer course and larger opportunities. 
Even in the storms of controversy there has been exhibited 
I Vincentius LirincMisis, Commonitorium, chap. I. 



THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 9/ 

a singular unanimity in the enjoyment of the grace that 
pertains to the personal life in Christ. God is more delib- 
erate in withdrawing than error in creeping in. Antag- 
onists in the council or the synod become brethren at the 
Supper of the Lord. It has also been noticed that the 
fruits of the Spirit often survive in the life of those who, by 
the perversions of the intellect, no longer endure sound 
doctrine. 

The document of our religion is the treasure of the 
Church, and its use by the individual, in his relation to the 
whole body of necessary truth revealed through the Logos, 
is a duty ; but a duty to be discharged under the limita- 
tions which the Catholic Christian should love to honor 
and obey. It is entirely practicable to ascertain whether 
or not private beliefs regarding the substantial truths are 
identical with the mind of the Spirit, by comparing them 
with the teachings of the Book as revealed to, perceived, 
taught, formulated and maintained by the ecumenical mind 
of the Church. Then one may say with St. Paul, I have 
received the Spirit that is of God that I may know the 
things that are freely given to m^e of God. ^ But, we re- 
peat it, he can know that his convictions are based upon 
the firm foundation of certitude only to the extent that 
they correspond with those eternal types of truth which 
Catholic Dogma presents to his lowly and teachable mind. 
And it is a deep marvel why he should desire any other 
system of truth than that which has been traced upon the 
intelligence of the Body by the light which flows from the 
intelligence of the Head. 

1 1 Cor. ii. 12. 



98 CA THOLIC DOGMA. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE ROMAN PONTIFF NOT INFALLIBLE. 

AMONG the many individual* who make the age re- 
sound with their pretensions, there is one voice heard, 
a louder and deeper note than the rest, clamorously ap- 
pealing to be recognized as the very voice of God Himself. 
It is the voice of one who professes to possess a power, 
and to wield an authority, in the realm of truth, which no 
Apostle ever dared to claim, and w^ho announces himself 
the perpetual organ of the Paraclete. We must speak of 
him as a man rather than as a Bishop, for it is not easily 
to be forgotten that in his decree at the Vatican Council, 
Pius held that it is not the Bishop of Rome, but "the 
Roman Pontiff'* who "is possessed of that infallibility with 
which the divine Redeemer vv^illed that Plis Church should 
be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith and 
morals.'* ^ Although it is true that the title of pontifex was 
anciently applied to bishops, particularly to those in the 
greater sees, it is evident, in the preceding chapters of the 
decree, that the stupendous prerogative is claimed, not so 
much by virtue of the Pope's episcopal office, as because 
he is " the successor of blessed Peter, Prince of the Apos- 
tles." 

"The Roman Pontiff," said Cardinal Manning, "is dis- 
tinct from the Episcopate, and is a distinct subject of 
infallibility, and in the exercise of his supreme doctrinal 
authority, or inagiste7'ium^ he does not depend for the in- 

^ ** First Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ," chap. iv. 



THE ROMAN PONTIFF NOT INFALLIBLE, 99 

fallibility of his definitions upon the consent or consulta- 
tion of the Episcopate, but only on the divine assistance 
of the Holy Ghost." ^ Thus, through the assumption of 
an individual, rejecting all authority external to his own 
mind, our Lord's institution of the Episcopate is ignored, 
all Bishops are ^' subtilized to a bodiless shadow," ^ or re- 
duced to papal commissaries ; and the primacy of an Apos- 
tle, which was at most a personal privilege rather than 
an official prerogative, and which, whatever its nature, was 
not committed to a succession in perpetuity, is made the 
basis upon which all historical Christianity must be reared, 
and the official deliverances ^ of this Pontiff must be re- 
garded as the infallible and irrevocable teaching of the 
Holy Ghost, being free from all blemish and error, not by 
virtue of any participation therein of any other mind, or 
any corporation of minds, although the universal Episco- 
pate w^ere included in the number, nor because of any an- 
tecedent perception or subsequent consent of the Church 
at large,'* but solely in consequent of the inherent and per- 
petual prerogative of the incumbent of an office which is 
held to be that which St. Peter first occupied as primate 
among the apostles. 

The dagger-point of this error, which, if unopposed, 
would let out the life-blood of true Catholicity, and substi- 

1 Petri Privilegium, III. p. 113. 

2 Dollinger : Letter to the Archbishop of Munich and Frcising, 
March 28, 1871. 

3 I. The Roman pontiff, speaking ex cathedra, has a divine assist- 
ance which preserves him from error. 11. He speaks ex cathedra when 
he speaks under these five conditions : (i) as supreme teacher ; (2) to 
the whole Church ; (3) defining a doctrine ; (4) to be held by the whole 
Church ; (5) in faith and morals. This is the substance of the doctrine. 

4 ** Ideoque ejusmodi Romani Pontificis definitiones ex sese, non 
autem ex consensu Ecclesiae, irreformabilis esse." First Dogmatic Con- 
stitution on the Church of Christ. Chapter iv. 



100 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

tute a theocratic paganism in its stead, lies in its elevating 
an individual to a position which can be competently 
occupied by no other individual than the Incarnate God. 

The amiable Pio Nono, firmly convinced of his personal 
infallibility when speaking ex cathedra to the Church con- 
cerning doctrine or morals, and believing himself to be in 
constant and special communication with the Holy Ghost, 
illustrated the Vatican dogma ; but his delusion also illus- 
trated its falsity. It was a delusion which as to its essence 
was anticipated in the enthusiastic mysticism of Tauler 
and Bohm ; but a delusion more profound by a thousand 
degrees, seeing that his dogma required him to believe as 
explicitly in the infallibility of all his Petrine predecessors 
(including even those who taught essential heresy), as in 
his own. 

The Vatican theory is a singular combination of Cath- 
olic truth and Protestant error. The well-known formula, 
'^ faith and morals," declares upon what subjects the pon- 
tificial decisions ex cathedra are infallible, and the term is 
defined to cover that depositmn which was committed to the 
Church, as the revelation of the Divine truth and of the 
Divine law, the Church being the guardian and witness, the 
interpreter and the expositor of the truth and of the law, 
/>., of faith and morals. This is distinctly the Catholic 
position as far as it is a definition of faith and morals, old 
as Christianity itself, unchanged now because unchange- 
able, the way in which are to be discerned the stately step- 
pings of the Holy Ghost. But in the twinkling of an eye, 
the statement loses its sublimity, as an individual, a 
pontiff, steps forward and announces the competency of his 
private judgment to ascertain the truth of the depositum. 
He could not more accurately state the position of our self- 
sufficient *' Bible Christians," so-called. 

The Scriptural basis which the Pontiff alleges — though 



THE ROMAN PONTIFF NOT INFALLIBLE, lOI 

with what consistency he appeals to any authority beyond 
himself does not appear — is the language which our Lord 
addressed to St. Peter, " I have prayed for thee, that thy 
faith fail not, and, when thou art converted, strengthen thy 
brethren." ^ But the application of this promise to tho 
line of Roman Pontiffs is not in accordance with the voice 
of antiquity. None of the fathers ever found infallibility 
in it, nor did the Church ever so believe. Dollinger's 
challenge was fearless and has not been successfully 
answered : " I am ready to prove that this assertion is 
based upon an entire misconception of the traditions of the 
Church for the first thousand years and upon an entire 
distortion of her history. It is in direct contradiction to 
the plainest facts and testimonies." 

It was by force of necessity that the Pontiff announced 
himself independent of the consensus Ecdesice, For to 
have recognized the infallibility of universal judgments 
within the Body of Christ would have been fatal to his 
exclusive claim of supereminence. It was seemingly no 
more than an empty act of courtesy when Pius annexed 
the words " sacro approbante concilio " to his decrees. 
Had he submitted even to that slight extent to t\\Q placet of 
Catholic Christendom, an unterrified voice would have 
declined, and continued to decline to recognize the Holy 
Spirit in the Vatican Dogma. To say nothing of the 
negative attitude of other portions of the Church, it v/as 
reported that the Patriarch of Constantinople when declin- 
ing an invitation to attend the council at the Vatican said 
to the representatives of the Roman Pontiff, among other 
things, that in Ecumenical Councils there is infallibility 
when they are in accordance with the Scriptures and apos- 
tolic tradition — a reply which not only denies the Roman 
pretension, but asserts the superiority of Catholic consent 
I St. Luke xxii. 32. 



102 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

over even a truly universal council. It was precisely upon 
this ground that the Councils of Constance and Basle 
asserted the superiority of an ecumenical council to the 
Pope. 

Bishop Hefele, who was one of the strenuous minority in 
the Vatican Council, hardly took its edge from this error 
when he proposed this via media : " Is the Pope," he 
asked, " above or below the Church ? Neither the one nor 
the other. The Pope is in the Church ; he necessarily be- 
longs to it ; he is its head and its centre. The Church, 
like the human body, is an organized whole ; and just as 
the head is not superior or inferior to the body, but forms 
a part of it, and is the principal part of it, so the Pope, 
who is the head of the Church, is not superior or inferior 
to it ; he is therefore neither above nor below the general 
council.** But to this and every other shade of opinion 
concerning this ambitious pretense, there is one all-suffi- 
cient reply : the Head of the body is not Primate Peter, 
nor his assumed successors. There is no Head but the 
Lord Christ, nor any official Primate but He ; nor has He 
any Vicar upon the earth but the Paraclete, nor any organ 
other than His Body, the Spirit-bearing universal Church. 



AfO ORDER OR BODY OF MEN INFALLIBLE, I03 



CHAPTER XIV. 

INFALLIBILITY NOT RESIDENT IN ANY ORDER OR 
BOD Y OF MEN, 

THE divine gift of inerrancy in the perception of 
dogma is not the privilege of any individual. But 
does not the Holy Ghost bestow it upon some particular 
body or class in the Church ? Is there not a high estate of 
spiritual nobility to whom this honor comes as a special 
grace ? As a part cannot equal the whole, the reply must 
be a negative one. The promise of the Spirit as the Way- 
Leader of the Church was made only to the whole Body. 
Although originally addressed to the Apostolic College 
collectively and individually, it was only because of their 
representative character, and because they antedated in 
time and outranked in dignity the other orders of the min- 
istry. St. Paul plainly teaches us that " God hath set some 
in the Church : first^ apostles ; secondarily, prophets," ^ etc. 
But the promise made to them was really addressed to the 
universal Church.^ At its birth, on the day of Pentecost, 

^ I. Corinthians xii. 28. 

2*' Neither must we think that this Comforter was either promised, 
or else given, only to the Apostles, but also to the universal Church of 
Christ, dispersed throughout the whole world : for unless the Holy 
Ghost had been always present, governing and preserving the Church 
from the beginning, it could never have sustained so many and great 
brunts of affliction and persecution with so little damage as it hath ; and 
the words of Christ are most plain in this behalf, saying that * the 
Spirit of truth should bide with them forever,' that * he would be with 
them always (he meaneth by grace, virtue, and power), even to the 
world's end.' " — Book of Homilies^ Sermon on Whitsunday^ Part II, 



104 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

when the first impact of the Spirit took place, the Church 
was identical and conterminous with the Eleven. The 
Spirit endowed them with plenary perceptive power, the 
crudity of their views was displaced by intelligent insight, 
and truth stood revealed to them in its ineffable beauty and 
perfect symmetry. The heart that had been slow was now 
alert to believe. The memory which had been dull now 
recalled every word and event of the past days with micro- 
scopic accuracy. But these new endowments were not 
bestowed upon them chiefly because of their official char- 
acter. They had been apostles in the former days, when 
their minds were dull and their perceptions obscure. But 
at this distinct epoch, in the economy of the Holy Spirit, 
transitional and temporary as it was, they and they alone 
constituted the Spirit-bearing and Spirit-transmitting Body 
of Christ, and to them as such the promised guidance of 
the Spirit at first came.^ When our Lord performed His 
miracle of feeding the multitudes. He first gave the articles 
of food to the disciples, and they delivered them to the 
people. In like manner the Apostles were made the re- 
cipients of the blessing that was to flow out into and fill the 
expanding Church. As soon as the Church, in the person 
of the Apostles, began to sow the seed of the divine truths 
of salvation by the Incarnation, she began to realize a spir- 
itual harvest, and, by the agency of teaching and baptism, 
multitudes were garnered into the Church. Immediately 
that peculiar corporate indwelling of the truth-revealing 
Spirit which had been enjoyed by the Body numbering 
eleven persons became the possession of the Body number- 
ing thousands, and as the Lord added daily to the Church 
" the saved," the blessing was extended to thousands more. 
It was only at the transitional point that the Apostles held 

' F/^^ Bishop Mobedey's Bampton Lecture, "Administration of the 
Spirit," p. 38. 



NO ORDER OR BODY OF MEN INFALLIBLE, I05 

in themselves the covenanted illumination of the Spirit, the 
promised guidance of the Odi]yo^^ as a reservoir at the 
foot of a mountain may contain the waters of the spring 
upon the mountain's side which are to flow out through this 
receptacle upon all the lands beneath. Henceforth they 
must share with the whole the capacity of perceiving truth, 
and look to the universal acceptance thereof as the sign 
and token of the divineness of their messages. The pecu- 
liar gift and influence which is termed inspiration, by which 
they were enabled to convey the contents of revelation in 
the use of oral and other means of communication, had 
primary reference to the delivery of the truth rather than 
to their conscious perception of it. The purpose of the 
gift was temporary,^ and its possessors were mortal. The 
inspired teachers and writers did not survive the first cen- 
tury ; but the Church, whose perceptions were refined and 
guided by the Holy Spirit so as to identify the truth thus 
delivered, and to formulate it more or less fully, was to en- 
dure throughout all generations as the Body of Christ, the 
Depository of the Fullness of the Spirit, the Keeper and 
Witness of the Faith, the Catholic Church, holding in her 
hands with steadfast fidelity the Holy Scriptures and the 
Catholic Dogmas. 

^ The Apostles had no successors in their inspired capacity. They 
were under the guiding ** promise of the Father" to bear witness con- 
cerning the things which they had seen and heard (St. Luke xxiv. 48 ; 
St. John XV. 27), and to the discharge of this duty they only w^ere com- 
petent. Other functions, as of government, sacramental ministration, 
and propagation, they were explicitly commanded to perpetuate by fill- 
ing up their ranks as they might become depleted by death or apostasy. 
The apostolic succession, as a fact of history, began to be illustrated on 
the day of Pentecost by the selection of a successor to the traitor Judas. 
** We are able to count those who by the Apostles were appointed 
Bishops in the Churches, and their successors, to our own time." — St, 
Irenceus, 



Io6 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

If the Apostolic College, contemplated separately from 
the whole body of the faithful on the earth, did not consti- 
tute a permanent organ of the Holy Ghost, it must, by 
parity of reasoning, be denied that the universal Episcopate, 
viewed as the perpetuated Apostolate, may claim the tre- 
mendous prerogative. This theory prevailed to a wide 
extent in the Roman communion ^ even in recent times, and 
has its advocates in our own, to whom it furnishes, illu- 
sively as we think, a refuge from uncertainty and a practi- 
cable basis of certitude. Cardinal Manning in his pre- 
Vatican book on the Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost ^ 
declared that the pastoral ministry, as a body, cannot err, 
because the Holy Spirit, Who is indissolubly united to the 
mystical body, is eminently and above all united to the 
hierarchy and body of its pastors ; and that, united to its 
centre (the Pope), is in all ages divinely sustained and 
divinely assisted to perpetuate and enunciate the original 
revelation. The Pope left out, many Anglicans hold this 
view, but the claim is too exclusive : it practically makes 
the Church consist of one order of its ministry ; and it was 
a merited fate that this order which, by the mouth of the 
Cardinal, so summarily consigned the whole body of the 
baptized to insignificance in the economy of the Church, 
should have to witness its own vaunted powers absorbed 
by the occupant of what is called the Chair of Peter on 
that ill-starred day when the Pope announced his official 
infallibility. 

The proper function of the Episcopate may be stated 

^ ** Verba quibus Christus ecclesine docenti inerranti^e donum pollicitus 
est, spectant ad corpus seu ad collectioncm episcoporiim." — Baillyy De 
Ecclesia^ p. 592. " Privilegium infallibilitatis non individuis sed corpori 
episcoporum fuit promissum ; ita omnes sentiunt." — Bouvier^ De Ec- 
^Icsia, p. i8g. 

2 Page 91. 



NO ORDER OR BODY OF MEN INFALLIBLE, lO/ 

by affirmation and negation under three heads as fol- 
lows : 

First. The Episcopate is the instrument of the Church's 
propagation j but not of her illumiitatioii. 

Second, It is the fountain of order; but not of reveIatio?t, 

Third, It is the faithful teacher; but not the infallible 
guide. 

It has been endowed with solemn and holy relations to 
the Faith. It must co-operate with the Holy Ghost in 
proclaiming, defending, and spreading abroad the knowl- 
edge of the saving truths and grace-conveying institutes of 
the holy Gospel. It must rule, teach, guide, and discipline 
to the edifying of the Body of Christ, according to the in- 
tegrity of the one Faith, and in the faithful discharge of its 
manifold functions, as well in evil as in good report, as fear- 
lessly in ages of unbelief as in ages of faith, as tenderly as 
firmly, it will deserve and command the chief place of influ- 
ence in the Church. But it were an act of rebellion against 
the Head of the Church, a sin against the Holy Ghost, and a 
violence down to the Mystical Body of Christ should the pre- 
eminence of office and authority which belongs to the Epis- 
copate be made the pretended warrant for claiming a special 
illumination of the Spirit unto the infallible delivery of doc- 
trine. A council which should actually be composed of the 
Episcopate in its solidarity, that is be numerically ecumen- 
ical, would undoubtedly be a fountain of light and truth, of 
order and beauty, to the Catholic Church, and we have no 
right to deny that it iiiight formulate undogmatized verities 
so as to express the very mind of the Spirit, as councils 
including only a portion of the Episcopate have done.^ 

I The West was represented at the Council of Nicea by only a few 
bishops and by none at those of Constantinople and Epheses. At 
Chalcedon no Western Bishop except he of Rome was represented, and 
he only by his legates. 



I08 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

But as the Church hath no head save only the Lord 
Christ, and as the part cannot equal the whole in which 
alone resides the plenary presence of the Holy Spirit as 
teacher of truth, it were a very violent and quixotic 
assumption to contend that even such a council could 
possess inerrability in faith and morals, per se, although it 
might be presumed to enjoy supreme authority in matters 
of discipline. Such a body w^ould receive distinguished 
consideration and exercise almost overpowering influence, 
while its declarations would have great weight with the 
Church. But its real test would lie in the judgment of the 
Church. " The final authority of proper ecumenical syn- 
ods," says Palmer, " does not arise merely from tlie num- 
ber of bishops assembled in them, but from the approba- 
tion of the Catholic Church throughout the world ; which, 
having received their decrees, examined them with the 
respect due to so considerable an authority, compares 
them with Scripture and Catholic tradition, and by a uni- 
versal approbation and execution of those decrees, pro- 
nounces a final and irrefragable sentence in their favor." ^ 

The numerical strength of a general council is not the 
test of its ecumenicity. 

All of the ecumenical councils and many others of less 
note have vigorously maintained the Faith once delivered 
to the Saints, and their decrees have been like anchors 
cast into the deep to enable the Church to ride out the 
storms of heresy in safety. Indeed the great value and 
dignity of these bodies has acted like an enchantment upon 
the class of minds that are influenced by the naturalistic 
desire to find some visible organ of infallibility established 
in the world and has tempted them to misapprehend the 
I)lace of councils in the economy of the Church. Because, 

' '' Treatise on the Church of Christ." Bishop Whittingham's 
edition, vol. ii. p. 145. 



NO ORDER OR BODY OF MEN INFALLIBLE. IO9 

as in the case, for example, of Nice and Chacedon, the 
whole Church has borne witness that tl:ey did not err, 
many have concluded that they could not err. It was 
to meet this exaggerated estimate of their powers that 
the Anglican article ^ was framed which declares that gen- 
eral councils may err and sometimes have erred in things 
pertaining to God ; which was simply saying, that, how- 
ever worthy of veneration, they were not formally infal- 
lible. We know them to have made true and final state- 
ments of Christian dogma only as we know them to have 
been approved by that adequate authority which dwells in 
infinite plenitude in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Head of 
the Church, which is represented here on earth by the 
Holy Spirit, which certifies itself by His agency to the 
Mystical Body, and which finds final expression in the con- 
sciousness of the Avhole congregation of the faithful. Thus, 
when St. Gregory the Great declared that he received and 
venerated the Four Councils as he did the four books of 
the Holy Gospel, he proceeded to allege as his ground for 
doing so that they were ^'' imiversali constituta coiisensiL.'' 

The imprimatur of Catholic approval is the standing test 
of the ecumenicity of councils, and this was strikingly 
illustrated in the Council of Constance, which, having no 
^^ servus scrvorum'* above it but the claims of three rivals 
for the Petrine Chair to arbitrate, distinctly sought for 
.approval of its action by appealing to the whole body of 
its constituency, at which also Cardinal Cambray (Fenelon), 
supported by Chancellor Gerson, repeatedly announced 
that the privilege of inability to err in the faith belongs 
only to the universal Church. ^' The last mark," said Bos- 
suet,^ " of any council or assembly's representing truly 
the Catholic Church is when the v/hole body of the Epis- 
copate and the whole society Vv-hich professes to receive its 
I Art. XXI. 2 Quoted in "Palmer on the Church," vol. II. p. 148. 



no CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

instructions, approve and receive that council : this, I say, 
is the last seal of the authority of the council and the in- 
fallibility of its decrees." 

The note of infallibility in the delivery of truth not 
inhering even in so majestic and thrice sacred a body as 
an Ecumenical Council, we have no reason for expecting to 
find it in diocesan, provincial, or national synods. Many 
of these have formulated error, and most of them have 
mingled local opinions or crude statements with the Cath- 
olic truths ; and at special times, when the powers of evil 
seem to have been permitted to run riot in the Church, 
as during the Arian controversy, these lesser synods have 
rallied with treasonable celerity on the side of the error- 
ist. In later times, noted instances have occurred in which 
they seemed less earnest to proclaim Catholic truth than 
to effect compromises with insurgent forms of theological 
error. So much of their deliverances as are really and 
indubitably grounded in a Catholic Consensus must be 
accepted as conforming to the very truth ; but by what 
right may they put it upon the conscience to accept the 
totality of their decrees and articles as part of the Faith ? 
The true Catholic will prefer " ancient fidelity to new per- 
fidy, old soberness to new madness, ancient light to new 
darkness ;" ^ and it was no other than this principle which 
finally rescued the Church from the tidal-wave of Arian 
heresy. "Well-nigh the whole world," proving false for 
a time, could not overcome the Faithful who, as St. Vincent 
says, " by preferring ancient truth before new error, were 
untouched with any spot of that infection." ^ 

Of pretensions made on behalf of any particular body 

or class of persons that they enjoy the gift of perceiving 

truth without error, one other may be noticed. It is put 

forth by the advocates of an uncatholic theology, and forms 

' St. Vincent of Lerins. ^ »< Commonitorium," ch. iv. 



NO ORDER OR BODY OF MEN INFALLIBLE, III 

a logical and integral part of it. It is claimed that the 
Holy Ghost effects an inward revelation of the essential 
truths to "the true people of God,"^ or "the elect;'* that 
is to say, to those who, by the unconditional decree of 
God, have been chosen and called to a state of indefect- 
ible grace. The fatal defect of this theory is, that it is not 
possible for any individual to decide, with infallible cer- 
tainty, that he has been selected to form one of such a 
company of celestial favorites, while it is equally impos- 
sible for him to ascertain in what fellov/ship of light or 
darkness his brethren may be. So uncertain a foundation 
must contribute its uncertainty to the v/hole superstructure. 
For the same reason, it would be impracticable to secure 
a consensus of the faith of " the true people of God." God 
only knows who they are, and has not revealed to us their 
names. We are satisfied to enjoy the charitable hope that 
all the baptized into Christ are also in a state of salvation 
(in which we pray God they may continue unto their lives* 
end), and that all of them share in the estimable benefit 
of that irreformable Body of Catholic Dogma which the 
Holy Ghost has revealed to the ecumenical mind of the 
Church. This seems to us to be a pathway to certitude 
and robustness of faith much more practicable to the mind 
that is palsied with doubt, and almost ready to exclaim : 
Is there a definite faith > than the way that conducts toward 
the infinite mystery of God*s secret counsel in search of 
a census of " the elect," which probably has not yet been 
made up. 

^ " Systematic Theology," by Charles Hodge, D.D., vol. I. pp. 115, 
123. 






112 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 



CHAPTER XV. 

UNIVERSAL CONSENT ILLUSTRATED BY THE 
ANALOGY OF NATURE, 

OUR search among single persons, and among bodies 
of men for an organ of the Holy Ghost, through 
whom the Lord Jesus, as Head of His Church, makes 
infallible announcement of His revealed truth is, termi- 
nated. We have discovered that no individual mind dare 
put its teachings or decrees to St. Augustine's test : Secure 
judicat or bis terrarum. Even the Roman Pontiff dare not, 
without first unchurching a good part of Western Catholic 
Christendom, and conveniently forgetting the Holy East- 
ern Church. We have seen that the very alienations 
which divide so many Christian people into op- 
posing sects testify that each sundered community holds 
something not in common with the others, which it regards 
so essential as to justify the separation. The uncertainty 
verging toward general scepticism, consequent upon indi- 
vidualism, reveals the impossibility of finding truth by sol- 
itary searches. We have seen that no council, synod, or 
other assemblage is able to present valid evidence that it 
has been breathed upon by the Holy Ghost, so as to be- 
come in itself an adequate authority in the delivery of 
dogma to the Church. The final result of the induction 
is that such a man — such an order of men — does not ex- 
ist, and that we must seek elsewhere in order to identify 
the present and permanent exercise by our Lord of that 
prophetic function which inheres in Him as the Teacher 
sent from God. 



UNIVERSAL CONSENT ILL USTRA TED. 1 1 3 

We return with renewed confidence to the proposition 
that the only adequate subject of His supernatural instruc- 
tion is that Body which is the only supernatural organ- 
ism in the world, and that, because it is the only adequate 
subject of His instruction, it must be the only competent 
organ whereby the dogma of His instruction may be 
expressed and announced. This is His Mystical Body, 
the Church, dispersed throughout the world, and one in 
the purview of the Holy Spirit, holding one Lord, one 
Faith, and one Baptism, speaking in tones that represent 
His authority the absolute and irreformable truth of God 
which we are under sacred obligation to believe. 

It is at this point practicable to turn aside to the order of 
nature and find an analogy which may serve to strengthen 
the confidence of the doubting Christian in his acceptance 
of the principle of universal consent as the criterion of 
truth. This mode of the Spirit*s contact with the corpor- 
ate Christian consciousness rests solely on the chosen pur- 
pose and covenant engagement of Him Who established 
the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and it has been verified 
in the actual history of the Church in its own supernatural 
way. But the Head of the Church is He by Whom all 
things consist and it would be surprising should we fail 
to discover some traits of resemblance in the two spheres. 
This principle of the authority of universal judgments is 
certainly recognizable in the natural world. It was Hesiod 
who closed his ^^ Works and Days " with the lines : 

** The word proclaimed by the concordant voice 
Of mankind fails not ; for in man speaks God." 

And Cicero said : " that opinion respecting which there 
is a general agreement in universal nature must infallibly 
be true ; therefore it must be allowed that there are gods. 



114 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

for in this we have the concurrence not only of almost 
all philosophers but likewise of the ignorant and illiterate." ^ 
The argument e consensu gentiu7n is a favorite one in 
natural theology. The English Deists of the last century 
were accustomed to employ it and to speak of the notiticB 
communes of the human mind as divinely implanted, orig- 
inal, and indefeasible. These were the propositions : that 
there is one Supreme God, that He is to be worshiped, that 
worship consists chiefly of virtue and piety, that we must 
repent of our sins and cease from them, and that there are 
rewards and punishments in a future life. ^ Sir John 
Davies, a poet of the sixteenth century, wrote concerning 
the immortality of the soul : 

*' But how can that be false which every tongue 
Of every mortal man affirms for true ? 
Which truth has in all ages stood so strong 
That, loadstone-like, all hearts it ever drew.'* 

In his dissertation on the philosophy of Common 
Sense,3 Sir William Hamilton enumerated one hundred 
and six writers in ancient and modern times who have 
recognized the authority of universal beliefs. Moehler, 
with a wanner religious insight, shows that when our Lord 
constituted the community of believers as his permanent 
organ. He had recourse to no other law than that which 
prevails in every department of human life. He shows 
how the national spirit is expressed in every general act of 
a nation. " It is as it were the tutelary genius, the guiding 

1 Dc Natura Deorum, lib. i. xvii. So also Seneca, Epist. cvii. cxvii. 
** Multum dare solemus praesumptioni omnium hominum. Apud nos 
veritatis argumentum est aliquid omnibus videri." 

2 '* These truths, though often clouded, are found in all religions — 
their universal prevalence being, along with their immediacy, an unmis- 
takable mark of their verity." — Encycl. Brit, sub 7'oce " Deism." 

3 " Dissertations on the Works of Reid," pp. 770-803. 



UNIVERSAL CONSENT ILLUSTRATED, US 

spirit transmitted from its progenitors, the vivifying breath 
of the whole community ; and, indeed, the nations anterior 
to Christianity personified this their peculiar character, 
revered it as their national divinity, deduced from it their 
civil laws and customs, and placed all things under its pro- 
tection/' ^ 

This power of the general sentiment is independent of 
the individual, while every individual may contribute to 
and be controlled by it. A dissenting voice may speak 
but it jars upon the sensitive patriotism of the multitude, 
and its discord is drowned in the thunder of their acclam- 
ations. Equally strong in modern nations as in ancient is 
this national spirit, this devotion to ideas and things that 
are the revered possession of the commonalty. The wav- 
ing of a piece of bunting will kindle the enthusiasm of a 
people to white heat. A word which crystallized thoughts 
of ages gone is a rallying cry to millions. To defend a 
national idea, w^hich has the halo of a '''semper^ iibiqice, 
et ab 07nnibus^'' around it, great armies will spring to 
their banners at the alarum of a trumpet. In like man- 
ner the ordinary experience of mankind extending through 
long tracts of time leads to a perception of the truth of 
certain sequences or other relations of things, which ex- 
pressed in a sententious form, become a people's maxims 
and proverbs. These are accepted by each as the opinion 
of the whole, and become a kind of creed to govern life 
and lessen the ills and sorrows of humanity. The child 
amusing himself v/ith a brazen toy, and the astonished hus- 
bandman who finds a deposit of pyrites upon his farm, will 
hear and profit by the proverb, "All that glitters is not 
gold.'* The influence of this law of the reliability of uni- 
versal perceptions is thus seen to penetrate the entire nat- 
ural life of society, and their formularies are found to be 
I John Adam Moehler, D.D., — '* Symbolism," p. 274. 



1 1 6 CA THOLIC DOGMA, 

respected with spontaneity, and not always because they 
represent self-evident facts or truths. What ministers to 
their enforcement is the consciousness that there exists an 
adequate authority behind them, which has announced the 
obligation to accept them. The weight and dignity of the 
national spirit, the wisdom of ages compressed in a sen- 
tence, the irresistible force of the common opinion, the 
idea which no one consciously originated but which 
seemed to flash like an inspiration into thousands of minds 
in an instant, is found to constitute an authority to which 
men willingly bow without protest, dissent, or fear of being 
deceived. 

That which, in the order of nature, is a strong probabil- 
ity, associated with a suggestion of uncertainty, becomes, 
however, an infallible certainty in the order of supernat- 
ural grace. The ordinary perceptions of the universal 
mind, in their natural play and development, are wonder- 
fully true to truth, but in the realm of revealed truth they 
have the added gift of a superintending Divine Power 
Whose specific function it is, in relation to this very truth, 
to take of the things that pertain to this higher sphere and 
show them unto the Church. There is here no element of 
uncertainty whatever. The Lord Christ has instituted 
this method of delivery the better to impress His teachings 
upon the mind of man with infallible accuracy. The 
Church has her spirit, her Catholic genius, her own ways 
and words, her own peculiar institutes. These are nothing 
less than the heritage of a divinely controlled past. She 
has her Body of Dogma — an ecumenical faith. It is her 
faith because it is in accordance with the ecumenical mind. 
But we do not pause here, as in the order of nature. We 
press on under Pentecostal light to discover that it is the 
mind of the Church, because it is the mind of the Spirit, 
and, a step further on, that it is the mind of the Spirit, 



UNIVERSAL CONSENT ILLUSTRATED. 11/ 

because whatsoever the Spirit heareth that He speaketh, for, 
said the Head of the Church, He shall glorify Me, for He 
shall receive of Mine and shall show it unto you. This is 
the voice whose least command is law supreme to the 
Christian. It represents the ultimate authority in the 
realm of truth. It disperses the shadows of doubt and 
restores noon-light and faith to the vexed soul. 



Il8 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER, 

WE have thus reached the conclusion of the matter. 
Our Lord Jesus Christ, seated in the Cathedra of 
His mediatorial sovereignty, clothed with supreme au- 
thority, has made the truth infallibly known to His Mystical 
Body by the impact of the Divine Spirit upon the human 
spirit, producing " a peculiar Christian tact, a deep sure- 
guiding feeling, which, as it abideth in truth, leads also into 
all truth/' ^ This is what we have ventured to designate 
the Ecu77ienical Mind — the Church's mind — which perceives, 
thinks, feels, embraces, and holds one inerrable and irre- 
formable system of dogmatic truth, corresponding with 
which, and expressive of it, is the Ecumenical Faith^ con- 
taining the essential elements of Christian truth and order, 
and ascertained by the co7?imunis conse7isus of the Church. 
It was this deep interior faculty of identifying the heavenly 
wisdom which from the first recognized iinplicite and in due 
time explicite all necessary truth ; discerned in the baptismal 
formula commanded by our Lord the basis of all subsequent 
symbolism ; approved, and continued throughout all ages 
to approve, the Apostles's doctrine and fellowship ; per- 
ceived and received the earliest forms of sound words ; 
ratified the results of that slow process of accretion by 
which the rule of faith grew into more distinct proportions ; 
condemned the vagaries of uncatholic teaching ; sifted out 

^ Moehler, '* Symbolism," p. 271. 



THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER, II9 

the canon of Scripture from the body of early Christian 
literature ; rejected the teeming novelties of opinion and 
the subtle assaults of philosophy which sought to supplant 
what had been held from the beginning ; and gave au- 
thority under Christ to that fixed body of dogmatic truth in 
which men may trust as in God. It was this verifying 
sense which, putting the seal of ecumenicity upon the 
truths which were delivered by an oral ministration, and 
committed to the Church under the subsequent guidance 
of a written record, enshrined them, compactly and intelli- 
gibly, in the Catholic Creeds. It was this same common 
sense which recognized the legitimacy of no other principle 
by which to interpret the meaning of the Creeds than that 
of reference to the actual belief or practice or use of the 
whole Church. That which was universal was true and to 
be respected and maintained. The universality of Episco- 
pacy, for instance, was fact interpreting the doctrine of the 
Church. The universality of infant baptism was the 
Church's use interpreting the doctrine of baptism for the 
remission of sin. To keep holy the Lord's Day was, by 
the custom of the whole Church, made apparent as a part 
of the Faith. It was this inward instinct which sur- 
vived the most seductive temptations of error, refusing 
to be charmed into apostasy because discerning the notes 
of discord which, however ingeniously mingled with the 
strains of truth, jarred upon the delicate ear to which the 
Holy Ghost was wont to speak ; and so won back to the 
pure music of the Catholic Faith those who, whether in 
groups or multitudes, were for a time drawn away to listen 
to the jangled tones of heresy. It is this voice of the 
whole Church, speaking with distinct, uniform, and un- 
tremulous tone the One Faith containing all things neces- 
sary to salvation, which rebukes those truth-seekers who 
still go out after the variable voices that fill the world with 



120 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

their confused jargon. It was this profound instinct, in- 
formed in the Church by the Holy Spirit, which enabled 
her to perceive the developed doctrines of the Nicene age, 
not as new truths, but as fuller statements by interpreta- 
tion of old truths misunderstood, or by defense of old 
truths antagonized. No other power of development can 
be conceived, except upon the hypothesis of an unfinished 
revelation, which would involve the implication that the 
Church did not at first possess all things necessary to sal- 
vation, whereas the original depositum was all-sufficient.^ 
St. Vincent of Lerins happily illustrates the distinction 
between the idea of increase and that of change. " This 
is the nature of an increase, that in themselves severally 
things grow greater ; but of a change that something be 
turned from one thing which it was to another thing which 
it was not." Here is in part his illustration : " Let the 
religion of our souls imitate the nature of our bodies, 
which, although with process of time they develop and 
unfold their proportions, yet they remain the same that 
they were. There is a great difference between the flower 
of youth and the ripeness of age, yet the self-same men 
became old which before were young ; so that although 
the state and condition of one and the self-same man be 

^ ''Whatever more may be needful in order to identify, guard, vin- 
dicate, save from misconstruction, combine, apply [Apostolical] doc- 
trine, nothing further can possibly be needed in the way of new doc- 
trine. The faith once delivered to the saints, as it saved them, so would 
undoubtedly suffice to save all mankind, even to the day of judgment. 
No new objects of worship, no new principles of duty, no new exhibi- 
tions of truth, can be conceived to be introduced afterwards, except on 
one of two equally inadmissible hypotheses — the imperfection of the 
explicit faith of the churches founded by the Apostles, or the design of 
God, by further revelation, to make the Christian system not final." — 
Moberley, ** The Great Forty Days." Pref, to second edition, p. 
xli. 



THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER, 121 

altered, yet one and the self-same nature, one and the self- 
same person, doth still remain." ^ It was the Holy Spirit 
in union with the ecumenical mind Who accomplished the 
early development. It is this same capacity of responding 
perceptively to the teachings of the Spirit which renders 
the Church perpetually competent by the same Spirit to 
further define truths that have been revealed, but are not 
explicitly necessary to salvation — subject to the delays, and 
impediments which human frailties impose, and conform- 
able to that law of stately deliberation which Almighty 
God, Who is patient because eternal, has illustrated in all 
preceding dispensations, and observes in this ; yet is not 
slack as some men count slackness. Delay may be the 
penalty which He inflicts upon an externally divided 
Church,^ but as the ages go on more light will shine out 
from above upon the old truths ; the Holy Spirit will 
bring His co-operating power to bear upon this under 
lying corporate faculty of discernment ; some voice, that 
of a doctor of the Church, of an humble but holy thinker, 
hid away in retiracy, of a local synod, or it may be of 
a truly ecumenical council, gladdening the hearts of men 
and angels with its reappearance after ages of cruel anathe- 
mas and separation — some voice will utter the happy 
definition ; and, finally, the consentient Church will per- 
ceive it, and adopt into the sacred fellowship of Catho- 
lic Dogmas the word that shall express the larger in- 
sight she has gained into the profound depths of ancient 
truth. 

But no essential truth will be added. Necessary dogmas 
are, in the nature of the case, few, and these are stated 
and set forth in the creeds, as held and illustrated by the 
Catholic Church. They are not necessary, because they 

^ Commonitorium I. xxiii. 

2 Bishop Forbes on the XXXIX. Articles, p. 284. 



122 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

are in the creeds, but they are in the creeds because they 
are necessary. They were held and believed before they 
were enshrined in these symbols — /. <f., from the first. The 
creeds teach us, by inclusion, what are the necessary fac- 
tors of Catholic Dogma, and hence, by exclusion, what are 
non-essential. Nothing can be formally de fide which the 
Holy Ghost, the Vicar of Christ, does not teach to the 
Church, and which the Church does not perceive and 
formulate. For this reason, he who finds in universality 
of acceptance a simple, substantial and all-sufficient basis 
of certitude, on which even doubt may rest as on the 
adamantine stone, will repudiate the right of any individ- 
ual, crowned, or mitred, or masterly in theology, or of any 
order or assemblage of m^en, to establish as a term of Cath- 
olic communion opinions or speculations of individual 
origin and limited acceptance, systematized statements of 
doctrine based upon some private philosophical view of 
religion, widely held but not universally received infer- 
ences from Catholic Dogma — views which are claimed to 
constitute the peculiarity of any special sect of people 
without, or coterie or party within, the Church — obscure 
ideas in Holy Scripture upon which there has not prevailed 
any consensus of interpretation, facts and ordinances 
which, while religious in their character, lack divinely- 
ordered connection with the rise and development of the 
kingdom of heaven. Nothing which lacks the placet of the 
ecumenical mind can be a matter of necessary faith ; and 
this remark will apply to all formularies whatsoever, 
whether of local or general acceptance ; and, when ap- 
plied to the Catholic creeds themselves, it solves every 
problem — e.g.^ the problem of the Filioqice — for it expur- 
gates them of every syllable v/hich does not rest upon 
the common consent of Christendom. This remark 
will apply also to all questions of interpretation, and to 



THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER, 1 23 

all uses, instruments and institutes which pertain to the 
Church. 

There has ever been manifested a perverse ambition to 
go before the Holy Spirit and enlarge the sanctuary of 
truth, so as to include within it what the Church, either by 
affirmation or denial, has excluded. This sinful folly has 
resulted in the strifes that have torn the seamless robe of 
Christ, the logomachies that have borne the bitter fruit of 
schism, the contentions that deafen the ear of the age. 
What Bishop Jeremy Taylor said in his " Liberty of Proph- 
esying'' concerning a disputed question, will apply gener- 
ally — " Either it is not revealed, or not so clearly but that 
\vise and honest men may be of different minds, or else it 
is not of the foundation of the faith but a remote super- 
structure, or else mere speculation ; or perhaps, when all 
comes to all, it is a false opinion or a matter of human 
interest that we have so zealously contended for ; for to 
one of these heads most of the disputes of Christendom 
may be reduced. So that I believe the present fractions, 
or the most, are from the same cause which St. Paul ob- 
served in the Corinthian schism, ^ when there are divisions 
among you, are ye not carnal ? ' " ^ Why, then, should men 
rend each other over questions which they cannot settle ? 
Will there never dawn an irenic age in which Ephraim and 
Manasseh shall no longer vex each other? Surely, the 
Church ought to perceive that her divisions have been 
caused by strife concerning questions of subsidiary im- 
portance. The parties that exist w^ithin her pale find occa- 

' The ** golden-mouthed" Bishop in this book, as well as in his Doc- 
tor Dubitantium, did not incline to the authority of universal judg- 
ments, but in a later utterance he announces a complete change of 
opinion. Bishop Jebb wrote of him that "he had seen, felt and 
weighed every difficulty ; the result of all was a deliberate persuasion 
that Vincentius was right, and that he himself was wrong." 



124 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

sion of quarrel only when they take up questions which, 
so far as the mind of the Spirit has been revealed, do not 
involve the essence of our religion. A millennium of con- 
troversy, with regard to the mode of union which subsists 
between the outward and the inward parts of the Lord's 
Supper, has been wasted upon a question which, like the 
mode of psychological contact which governs the Holy 
Spirit in His communication with the human spirit, our 
Lord may not purpose to reveal to the Church. Although 
the question does not emerge in the creeds, there is un- 
doubtedly a co7nmunis consensus as to the fact of the union ; 
but when we think of the modus^ while we may reverently 
meditate, we have no right to dogmatize, nor has any 
teacher the authority to enforce his opinions as the mind 
of the Spirit.' 

It were a usurpation of the awful functions of the Holy 
Ghost to seek to elevate a statement of mere opinion con- 
cerning any subject to the dignity of a dogma, whether it 
be done by a layman or a clergyman, a synod, a council, 
or any other body of men. Forgetful of all this, contend- 
ing theologians have been guilty of this sin, and have in- 
flicted upon the Church and the world the consequent 
curse of separatism. It is this wearying strife of tongues 
which causes doubt to spring up in many minds who 
would gladly escape the apparent alternative. But the 
doubter should consider that the smoke and dust of this 

^ Keble, speaking in his "Letters of Spiritual Counsel," p. 212, of 
the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist as not having been a subject of 
ecumenical enactment, says: "Well, therefore, may each person, or 
each portion of the Church, for himself or itself, form strong opinions, 
and express them strongly, as God shall guide them, on the several 
points involved in the doctrine ; but to impose them as Articles of 
Faith, making those heretics who demur to them, they are not, I con- 
ceive, competent, except the point be such an one as can be shown to 
have been unequivocally received by the whole Church from the begin- 
ning ; such (e.g») as the inspiration of Holy Scripture." 



THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER. 1 25 

perpetual controversy do not reach those calm altitudes 
where the dogmatic faith serenely abides, receiving the 
Spirit-taught allegiance of the whole Church. That only 
is the ecumenical faith which enjoys the certification of 
the ecumenical mind. On that rock let the doubting mind 
and weary heart rest. It represents the dogmatic unity of 
all the legitimate branches of the Church. Above their 
diversities, grave as they are, rises that Catholic Faith, 
tenaciously held by each, professed in perfect unison 
by all. 

It must needs be that offences come. The perfection of 
that heaven-born order whereby different members are 
designed to work in harmony comes into contact with 
human freedom and imperfection. Tides of evil surge up 
within and rush in from without. The eye begins to say 
to the hand, I have no need of thee, and the head to the 
feet, I have no need of you.^ By the alchemy of human 
perversity, varieties are transmuted into contrarieties. The 
very truths which naturally tend to create and conserve 
unity in the Church, thus become occasions of debilitating 
controversy. The consequences are inevitable — heresy, 
and what St. Paul terms *' schism in the body.*' These 
conditions must be accepted as incident to a disordered 
world and an imperfect nature. There is often a malignity 
of self-will in men which will not permit them to surrender 
even to the "majestic evidence" furnished by a consensus 
of humanity. But it is well to remember how there is in 
God a prerogative to make the wrath of man to praise 
Him. Doubt has its holy mission if it lead to the presence 
of the Lord where " spectres of the mind " dare not appear, 
and in that presence to a stronger faith and nobler life. 
Heresy has desolated many a fair and blooming field, but it 
has also been overruled for good. Apostasy has turned to 

* I. Cor. xii. 



126 CATHOLIC DOGMA, 

bless when it meant to curse. The bloody band of perse- 
cution, seeking to obliterate the faith by destroying its lit- 
erature, led the Church to gather up the sacred writings, 
and crystallize them into canonical shape. Scarcely a 
dogma of the faith, always the faith of the Church, but 
has been reasserted and brought out into fuller form and 
splendor in the course of controversy. 

Thus the external powers of evil have always seemed to 
conspire with moral deficiencies in the Church, to supply 
a gloomy background upon which, as on a tempestuous 
sky, the Holy Ghost has cast His bow of seven-hued 
beauty, and written there, in forms of ineffable splendor 
the legends of universal truth, the token and reality of 
His covenant Who said : " When He, the Spirit of Truth, 
is come, He shall guide you into all truth.'* 

In prosecuting this inquiry in regard to a substantial 
basis of certitude upon which faith may rest in undisturbed 
confidence, "like summer seas unvexed with storm," we 
have contemplated chiefly the difnculties of those who are 
under the influence of that incipient form of scepticism 
termed doubt, but who still maintain outward allegiance 
to the faith, and earnestly desire to be freed from the de- 
bilitating influence of their doubts. There are few among 
those who strongly believe who do not have reason to 
sympathize with these perplexed and anxious souls, whose 
faith, once aglow and radiant, is now a taper trembling in 
the tempest. They are more numerous than some like 
to confess, but for the most part they resist the tendency 
of their minds and take up arms against their doubt, having 
no pleasure in them, feeling in their souls that even as a 
conviction surrendered religion would still include the 
noblest things in life ; nor willing to let go all without man- 
fully struggling to regain full-orbed faith. Their emotions 
are expressed in the familiar lines : 



THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER. 12/ 

*' I falter where I firmly trod, 

And falling with my weight of cares 

Upon the world's great altar-stairs, 

That slope through darkness up to God, 

** I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all, 
And faintly trust the larger hope." * 

For those who have not forsworn their allegiance to 
Jesus as the central figure in the realm of truth and the 
master of their souls, we have sought to show that there is 
in Him the beginning of a pathway that will lead them to 
the Catholic Faith as a basis of explicit certitude. In this 
they may hear the very accents of that Voice which once 
on earth spake "as one having authority." Unwilling 
doubt will do more than "faintly trust" when the Lord 
Christ speaks. It will merge its tremors in the larger 
strength of an assurance such as that which St. Paul pos- 
sessed, and say " I know Whom I have believed, and am 
persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have com- 
mitted unto Him against that day." A faith which is thus 
emancipated from doubt and restored to robust vigor will 
be equipped as never before to withstand other assaults. 
Equally in communities as in individuals the reaction from 
doubt stimulates the capacity for believing, and ushers in 
an age of faith. In the confidence that such a day is ap- 
proaching, let us who doubt, and us who believe, fervently 
pray- 
Almighty and ever-living God, Who, for the greater 
confirmation of the faith, didst suffer Thy holy Apostle 
Thomas to be doubtful in Thy Son's resurrection ; grant 

^ Tennyson, " In Memoriam," LIV. 



128 CATHOLIC DOGMA. 

us so perfectly, and without all doubt, to believe in Thy 
Son Jesus Christ, that our faith in Thy sight may never be 
reproved. Hear us, O Lord, through the same Jesus 
Christ, to Whom, with Thee and the Holy Ghost, be all 
honor and glory, now and forevermore. Amen, 



i 



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